Business Digitalisation Strategy

Business Digitalisation is one of the buzzword in business world now as businesses wants to leverage on technology to help them being more efficient in what they are doing. Business Digitalisation can sounds threatening to some, given the idea that it is taking away our job and making human redundant.

Is this really the case?

It really depends on individual business owner but consideration for digitising a business must still be made with human in mind. Technology as a tool should enable human to perform higher value activities by taking away mandate and repetitive task. First and foremost, communicating and engaging customer does not falls into the aspect of mandate.

Hotel fires half its robot staff for sucking at their jobs

Just as businesses are not built overnight, the process of embarking onto this wagon should not be rush into. The purpose of why business wants to digitalisation must be answered and defined before even starting the process. Getting an COTS software and asking staff to use it, such as Accounting, CRM, ERP, does help in some cases. But when it comes to specific and maybe even proprietary processes, things get complicated.

• Are business willing to change their process?
• Will changing the process affects the current output, standard or quality?
• Does the solution provider understands their business?

Time taken to work out a properly designed business solution can be time-consuming and crossing multiple job functions. It takes a lot of time for both business owner and solution provider to communicate and establishing the trust for sensitive information to be shared.

Transition plan for embarking onto technology need to be plan out and people who will be impacted with these technologies need to be briefed and prepared. Depending on the nature of business, Change can either be progressively done over a period of time or swiftly implemented within the shortest possible time. There are no standard formula on this aspect and it varies from customer to customer, industry to industry. In view of this aspect, customer-vendor relationship is not likely to work for customised solution. Instead, a partnership model is preferred for such engagement.

What can I digitalised?

There are many aspect of a business that can be digitalised. However, the questions such as "Do I need to digitalise them?" and "Do I have the budget to do this?" need to be answered. Business should look at the purpose of this journey instead of just chasing after the wind and hype of getting digitalised.

Shall you decided to embark on this after all the considerations and communicating with your development partner, approach this disruption without being too disruptive to your team.