4 Initiatives to Start Your Digital Transformation this Week

Digital transformation is about changing where value is created and how your business model is structured. This is a large concept that can be overwhelming. Let’s start small with short-term technology initiatives you can begin this week.  

Why it’s important:  

Tackling large-scale, long-term digital transformation efforts can be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to complete. Starting small can lead to little victories, increased confidence, and contribute to the overall success of your organization’s digital transformation.  

What’s ahead: In this article, we’ll cover: 

• Kickstarting Your Digital Transformation 
• Four Digital Transformation Initiatives to Start This Week 
  • 1) Cloud migration readiness 
  • 2) Identify opportunities to automate 
  • 3) UX design usability audit  
  • 4) Build an AI strategy foundation 

Kickstarting Your Digital Transformation  

Digital transformation (DX) is the adoption of digital technology by a company to improve business outcomes. Bottom-line benefits including growth, infrastructure stability, and positive customer impacts are possible with successful DX. 

The bad news about DX is that most organizations never achieve it.  

An Everest Group Study, concluded that 73% of companies were unsuccessful at providing any value from their digital transformation process.  

The most common reason for this staggering percentage of failures? Poor planning and employee resistance.  

To pave a pathway for success, a company in pursuit of digital transformation does not have to tackle large initiatives at the onset, but rather pursue smaller projects to kickstart DX. 

Short-term digital transformation efforts can have immediate and positive effects on business and enterprise-wide digital transformation: 

• Little victories lead to more confidence in DX 
• Small initiatives help lay a solid foundation for larger transformations 
• Faster GTM and improved delivery 
• Streamlined workflows improve efficiency and productivity 
• Greater efficiency leads to a reduction in cost 

Four DX Initiatives to Start This Week 

Digital transformation is a journey and not a sprint to the finish line. That is why determining your need for a particular technology, your readiness for it, and laying a solid groundwork for its implementation are so critical.  

We’ve identified four initiatives that you can start this week to take the first steps towards digital transformation. Remember: Start small, enjoy the journey, and build momentum with little wins. 

1) Cloud Migration Readiness

Cloud migration is the process of migrating electronic assets from local servers to the cloud. Cloud storage is rapidly overrunning on-prem data warehouses because of its many positive business impacts including scalability, speed, collaboration, continuity, and rapid ROI. By next year, the cloud computing market is expected to reach $623 billion (for perspective, that’s about $1,900 per person in the US).  

The benefits of cloud adoption are excellent indeed. But to experience them, organizations must first determine their preparedness to migrate.   

Cloud adoption readiness is the process of examining your applications and data to determine if they can be moved to the cloud with minimal impact on operational continuity. This process includes an itemized checklist that guides the process and alerts enterprises of what needs to be done to ensure a smooth migration across the following faculties:  

• Business  
• People  
• Process  
• Platform  
• Operations  
• Security 

AWS designed its own program to help organizations assess their progress with cloud adoption and identify gaps in organizational skills and processes called the Cloud Readiness Assessment Tool (CART). 

Conducting a cloud readiness assessment will be your key to planning your migration and delivering convincing messages to stakeholders to get their buy-in. 

2) Identify Opportunities to Automate  

Did you know that around 35% of an average workload is repetitive and mundane? For a US organization with 500 people, the annual financial loss of repetitive tasks can be over $1.47 million.  

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of software bots to perform monotonous, rule-based tasks with more efficiency than humans. It has been proven to increase compliance by 92%, accuracy by 90%, and productivity by 86%.  

To start your organization on a trajectory towards RPA success, a four-step readiness investigation must be launched.  

• Needs assessment: To identify which, if any, processes are good candidates for RPA 
• Impact analysis: To understand how RPA will impact the process and if it will be positive or negative 
• Feasibility analysis: To determine if your processes and/or RPA strategy are aligned with available resources 
• Complexity assessments: Defined by the number of applications involved, frequency of human intervention, steps required to complete a task, etc. 

This investigation can begin at the grassroots level by exploring a single workflow. In fact, RPA can be launched and managed by any individual in an organization regardless of an overall strategy or technical expertise.  

Citizen development is the process of non-technical users building and developing software bots for either their own consumption or for their team with minimal to no coding.  

When employees build their own automations, they can perform their job more efficiently, help the company save on operating costs, and reduce IT backlog. 

3) UX Audit  

In a digital age, customer acquisition is especially important. Conducting a usability audit can identify where and why users abandon the customer journey. 

A UX design usability audit helps to identify problems in the design of your digital products including websites, apps, and other client-facing technologies.  

There are many ways to measure UX usability. The ISO 9241-11 standard recommends the following metrics to determine usability:  

• Effectiveness: The accuracy and completeness with which users achieve specified goals
  • Effectiveness can be represented as a percentage by using this simple equation:  

• Efficiency: The time the participant takes to successfully complete a task. 
  
• • Efficiency can be calculated with the equation below: 

Task Time = End Time – Start Time 

• Satisfaction: The comfort and acceptability of use 
  • After users attempt a task, they should immediately be given a questionnaire to measure how difficult that task was on a scale of “very difficult,” to “very easy.” 

4) Build an AI Strategy Foundation 

Building a successful AI strategy starts with a solid foundation. For this, you will need three things:  

• Quality, accessible data – Data is the DNA of AI. Before a strategy can form, you need to make sure you have quality data you can access. Your data sources should also be compliant with rules and regulations within your territory.  
• Leadership buy-in – Building an AI strategy is not a one-person job. So, once you’ve verified that your enterprise data is reliable and accessible, it’s time to spread the good word of AI. According to results from McKinsey’s global survey on AI, good overall leadership is a common characteristic of successful AI implementations. Getting support across all levels of management will improve the effectiveness of the AI strategy. Putting together a presentation on the positive business impact of AI can help sway leadership. 
• Minimize the knowledge gap – With the managerial layer on board, bringing employees into the fold is the next step. If employing additional AI talent isn’t an option, educating existing workers on artificial intelligence and data science will give them the tools to participate in and advocate for the AI strategy.  

Beginning your DX Journey 

Digital transformation is integration of digital technology into all areas of a business to fundamentally change how you operate and deliver value to customers. For the small portion of organizations that actually achieve DX, this process can take up to five years. 

Breaking it down into short-term initiatives can boost confidence, increase receptiveness, positively impact business processes, and improve the chances of achieving overall DX. Starting small is a big idea when it comes to digital transformation.  

To get help with your DX initiatives, check out Apexon’s Digital Strategy services or get in touch directly using the form below.