Last year spending on digital transformation reached $2.15 trillion globally as businesses across all sectors faced ongoing pressure to streamline operations and provide a better and more efficient service to their customers.
Whilst this total is expected to reach $3.9 trillion by 2027, for many organisations, the complexity surrounding the creation and ongoing maintenance of new technology-driven processes continues to stand in the way of turning digital investment into impact. According to research, around 70% of digital transformation efforts fail, with only one in eight digital transformation initiatives meeting their objectives.
With economic pressure continuing to take its toll on budgets, ensuring digital transformations are successful and deliver a strong ROI has never been more critical, but the journey isn’t always a simple one. Starting a digital transformation project can often be perceived as time-consuming, complex, and expensive. Processes are hard to find, out of date, and difficult to understand, and often teams that inherit processes experience a loss of context and control over them. Meanwhile, employees impacted by the transformation are often averse to change, making the thought of overhauling existing processes, far from inviting.
But it doesn’t have to be this way…
The secrets to success:
- Knowing where to start can often be complex and discouraging for those getting started with digital transformation.Before a process can be fixed or optimised, it must first be uncovered and analysed. Fortunately, there are tools available that can take the pain away from process discovery by creating a detailed map of all workflows scattered across the entire business. Process mapping is the practice of looking at all the actions that your organisations does and visualising them in the form of a map. These processes can occur daily, monthly, or even annually, be small or large. By creating this map, organisations can get a better understanding of how they are going to go about accomplishing their goals. Mapping processes also allows the business to understand the direct and indirect impacts changing one process may have on another, and the knock-on effect this could have on people, skills, systems, compliance and cost.
- Centralising processes is the next step on the journey to success. Digital transformation projects often require the development and improvement of multiple processes, so using Platform-as-a-Service technologies that can centralise and connect these in an easy-to-use interface is essential. Challenges and causes for transformation are also generally not limited to one single department, so it is important that multiple stakeholders across the business can have sight of these processes and their impact.
- Getting employee buy-in and engaging key stakeholders, however, is half the battle when embarking on a digital transformation project. Collaboration is key when it comes to success, so those driving transformation projects must involve those whom it will impact, from the offset. Ultimately, your team needs to understand what the problem is, and why you’re changing it. The projects that see the most success are led by those who take the end-user on the journey with them, rather than presenting them with the end product to find it either isn’t user-friendly or doesn’t fully address the original need.
Utilising human-centric tools for digital transformation is crucial to overcoming this. Day-to-day employees can only be invested in the project if they can be involved in the development. However, often due to complexity, transformation efforts are siloed to developers and those with technical skills. By embracing Platform-as-a-Service software that maps and centralises processes with a highly collaborative and intuitive user interface, organisations can engage business users, IT professionals, and process experts in mapping workshops, where employees can see their changes brought to life in real-time, and the impact created. Collaboration of this kind can also help to spark new ideas for further improvements throughout the transformation journey.
- Having access to the tools for change may seem obvious, but often process mapping software used by businesses does exactly what it says on the tin, leaving the transformation of these processes and finding the tools to do so, another task in itself. This is where adopting process mapping technology that can integrate with workflow automation tools such as RPA, AI and low-code development, is extremely beneficial. Being able to easily adopt these tools accelerates transformation efforts, meaning change happens faster, more efficiently, and with better results.
Ultimately, the secret to a successful digital transformation project is to empower those responsible for building processes to do so simply. Offering them the ability to document and continually improve the processes consistently and at scale, by removing duplication and eliminating errors, saves time.
By adopting robust and holistic tools that centralise the storage of process creation, whilst offering the integration of technology such as automation to uncover actionable insights and efficiencies, organisations can transform at speed. And this ensures a strong ROI on their digital transformation investment.
About the Author
Craig Willis is Head of Process Improvement Solutions at Netcall. As the CEO and one of the founders of Skore, Craig set out to empower the whole workforce to continuously find and fix broken processes. Their Process Improvement platform was designed to empower organisations to embed a culture of continuous process improvement. Prior to establishing Skore, Craig had been a product manager of Tibco Nimbus, responsible for delivering business process management (BPM) based solutions for transformation projects. In January 2024, Netcall acquired Skore to add process improvement to the Liberty platform.
