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Is Your Business Ready for Digital Transformation? The Key Steps!

01 Mar 2022

Mike Patel

Is Your Business Ready for Digital Transformation? The Key Steps!

Today, it’s not enough to have a well-crafted website; businesses need to ensure that people notice, visit and react (click, shop) to your website. Many businesses worldwide are in the midst of a digital transformation.

By implementing new tools, skills, and technologies, they see their business experience more growth than ever before.

You may be on the verge of a new digital transformation yourself, or you may be interested in starting one. In either case, you may need some guidance on how to proceed.

Let’s start by covering a set of six questions that you must ask yourself to assess if your business already has the right tools for the job or if you need to obtain them.

Among those questions, you’ll have to ask yourself if your organization is ready for change, do you have the right internal skills and so much more that’s vital to the process.

The Questions:

1. How do our existing processes support this digital vision and direction?

If you can determine which existing processes support your new direction and what processes don’t, you can easily see where your shortcomings will be and make the right corrections to fix the issues.

Even if you discover a process that supports your new digital direction, you must make sure that it does so optimally. The reason being is a poorly supporting function is hardly more useful than no function at all.

It’s a good idea to keep that in mind throughout the whole process.

2. Do we have the right technologies in place to support this vision?

On the same note as ensuring your processes support the transformation, you need to confirm your technologies are up to the same standard, especially considering this is a digital transformation.

You can do this by carefully assessing your technologies in all aspects, including whether or not they’ll be able to update to any new systems that you may implement.

If you find an area of technology to be lacking, you may need to correct it accordingly.

Remember that we’re also referring to the digital tools you often use. That can mean task management tools, social media tools, document collaboration tools and many more.

3. Is our organization structured to support this digital approach?

Evaluating your organization is one of the most important steps that you can take. You can have the supporting processes or technology. However, if your organization as a whole isn’t able to keep up and get behind the new digital transformation, it’ll fail.

Reach out to every department and every team leader to have a discussion about the state of everything in-house. That will give you an accurate picture of everything in your organization.

That will lead you to the next question…

4. Is our organization ready for change, or do we need help with this?

After you’ve had a thorough look at your organization, we hope that you’ll have some idea if you’re ready. But if not, that’s okay.

It may be a good idea to ask some more questions to your staff, or other leads, to really get a feel for the situation. It’s not uncommon for an organization to support change, only to fail at the implementation because they weren’t fully ready.

5. Do we have the right internal skills in-house today to support this vision?

Once you have the green light from your departments, technology and processes, ask yourself if you have the right skill set.

An adequate skillset is vital if you want to see the benefits from a successful digital transformation. For instance, you have this elaborate vision in mind, but it takes a particular type of person to implement it successfully.

Spend time evaluating the skillsets that you have at your disposal today. If you’re lacking in one area or another, you may want to bring in more help.

6. Does our product data and content support this digital vision?

Last question. It will either give you that final green light or the signal to stop and reevaluate your position.

Look at your data and your content, then ask yourself whether you can see room for both to prosper under your digital transformation. If you discover a reason to believe that one or both won’t, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to help your business grow. However, it may mean that more adjustments need to be made.

The Four Steps…

After addressing these questions and adjusting the organization as needed, let’s move on to the four steps that we mentioned previously. How you should proceed with your digital transformation to make it as successful as possible – the key steps.

Step one: Get Help Obtaining the Right Processes, Tools and Resources.

Whether you found that you had some tools or processes that support your information or not, you’re more than likely in need of more.

That’s what this step is dedicated to, finding more help.

If you’ve looked through your tools and found a few gaps in your coverage, then you need to see about filling that. The same applies to processes or resources. If you don’t have all three of these necessary things, you can’t make the transformation smoothly.

Step two: Include Voice of Customers and Employees.

This is similar to our questions three and four. However, this deals with the actual implementation of your digital transformation.

When you start this journey, you need to have all of your employees and customers aware and aligned with the new direction. That is to ensure that nobody is left confused or out of place. It happens more than you may think. Companies transforming without the knowledge of their base can lead to a severe backlash.

You could also consider surveying your employees to receive feedback on the new processes or tools being discussed. Doing so will give your employees the opportunity to have input on the processes that they actually use day to day.

Step three: Make and Invest in a Plan.

The last thing that you should do is go about this without a well-defined, agreed-upon plan.

If you don’t have a set plan of what you want to accomplish, then it can leave you and your organization in a state of panic even when you reach a goal.

Take the time to formulate a plan with your team, so you can all be on the same page. As you’re doing that, you need to keep in mind what each step will be asking of your employees or departments, then make sure they’re aware of that. That will go a long way when ensuring every step runs smoothly.

There are several ways that you could create this plan, and many articles give you rigid structures on how you should have the plan created. But the type of plan that will work is the type that you created specifically for your business.

Step four: Understand What Success Looks Like.

How will you know that you’ve succeeded?

How do you know that your company is on the path to new growth?

When you see things like enhanced data collection, better resource management, improved customer experiences and increased agility, you’ll know for sure that you’ve done it.

But those are only some of the benefits that come along with such a great transformation. The end result will look more like a controlled explosion of growth for your organization, ending with you at new heights.

Emerging Tech for Digital Business Transformation

Artificial Intelligence
Internet of Things (IoT)
Blockchain
Cloud Computing
Big Data
Augmented Reality

The Bottom Line.

As everything evolves around us, companies must be ready to meet that coming change head-on or get left behind. In fact, the question should no longer be, should I go digital? It needs to be how do I go digital.

So don’t wait any longer while others get ahead. Connect with an eCommerce Specialist at ioVista to learn how going digital can be a game-changer for your business.

Mike Patel

Mike Patel is a digital marketing enthusiast, innovator and President of a leading Digital and E-commerce Development Agency in Dallas, Texas. Mike holds a BS, Computer Science degree from Wayne State University and is a key player in the E-commerce development and digital marketing industry since 2004. The scope of technology in his extensive experience of more than 15 years ranges from Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) management, E-commerce SEO, Google Shopping Ads and more.