By Jason Timm, CloudSmiths CEO

Before 2020, the pivot towards digitalisation took place across industries, although at a very slow pace. Many businesses hesitated to adopt strategic digital transformation, holding onto tried-and-trusted legacy systems. All of this changed after 2020.

Business Survival in a Post-Covid World The COVID pandemic fast-tracked digital transformation processes in many organisations as businesses were forced to quickly adapt to remote-working models, rapidly evolving customer expectations and ongoing disruptions to the global supply chain. Old legacy systems and processes can no longer cut it in today’s digital-first world.

Digital transformation is no longer an abstract goal to achieve in the future. It is vital for future-proofing your business and making it more resilient to uncertainty.

At a high-level, digital transformation is the strategic integration of digital technologies into key business areas that change how a business operates and delivers value to customers.

The Changing Face of Digital Transformation The issue that businesses run into when it comes to digital transformation is that it looks different for every business, based on their operations, tools, systems, and existing digital cohesion. However, we can broadly identify a few flagship business areas that are targeted for digital transformation:

Operational efficiency – a large part of digitalisation is improving or updating existing business processes to make them more efficient. This can be through automating manual procedures, creating responsive workflows based on smart data-driven insights or improving end-to-end analysis that employees can access from anywhere.

Digital technology integration – Integrating more digital solutions into everyday business can automate repetitive processes, allowing them to run on autopilot and freeing employees’ time to focus their attention on larger operations.

Integration of technology should benefit a department or organisation as a whole. Ideally it should be an end-to-end solution or at least a solution capable of ‘talking’ to other tech solutions that are being integrated.

Customer experience – Customer expectations and needs have changed. Transformation strategies should reflect this. It is essential to offer multiple forms of customer engagement that reaches a customer on their preferred channel and provides a consistent customer experience across every device. Businesses should leverage historical data to personalise and contextualise the customer experience for each customer.

Workplace culture and leadership – The pandemic helped many businesses realise the value of offering employees remote and flexible working options. Digital transformation should help build a better workplace culture based on flexibility, trust and convenience that allows employees to have a healthier work-life balance.

Digital Transformation For Your Business Before taking any decisive action, It’s essential to define what digital transformation means for you. What critical areas of your business do you want to improve? What are the short and long-term benefits? These considerations will help you draw up an effective digital-transformation strategy for your business.