What Is Digital Transformation?
What Is Digital Transformation?
Posted on?Mar 13?DSS Business Growth
“Digital transformation” is one of those nebulous labels the tech sector is so great at cooking up for new and exciting developments.?But what does it mean, and does it matter to you and your business??
The short answers are that it’s the automation of manual business processes and yes, it very likely does matter to your organisation. That’s because it can make life easier for your customers, and make business quicker, cheaper and more accurate for you.??
Here’s an example of a digital transformation carried out by DSS for a New Zealand customer, an online office space booking service. Its processes, from sales through to bookings, payments and accounting, used to be handled by people using email and spreadsheets. We digitised those processes from end to end using custom software, and the benefits were immediate: less time spent on repetitive tasks, fewer mistakes, quicker turn-around of orders, and reduced costs.?
领英推荐
Another example is our Customer Observer solution, which analyses clients’ data for them and returns results that, in one case, predicts customer preferences for a fashion industry client and offers its customers unique recommendations at the checkout point on the e-commerce platform.?
We’ve digitally transformed our own business, too. DSS used to have three people tracking contracts from order through to delivery and then renewal. We automated that process using an inexpensive online tool and were quickly able to reallocate two of those roles to more productive and interesting work.??
Digital transformations don’t have to be big, either. We introduce them, for example, to the websites we build for customers by adding live chat bots and trouble-shooting engines.???
In every case, it’s been about taking a client’s slow old processes and shrinking them from days and weeks to just minutes. You don’t need me to tell you what that can mean to a business in terms of efficiencies and cost savings. And competitiveness.??
Because they have the luxury of in-house IT strategists, large organisations often have clear plans for digital transformation. Smaller businesses sometimes don’t and, for them, transformation can start with a review of their processes and a conversation about where to invest for the best results.?
Anthony Moore?
Client Delivery Director?