Creating a Digital Transformation Strategy in nine steps
1. Define your vision
As with any business plan, always start with your purpose (mission) and ambition (vision).
Remember your mission (or purpose) statement articulates why the business exists, and what purpose it serves. You’re essentially answering the question, “What do we do?” Meanwhile, your vision (or ambition) statement outlines your aspirations for the future.
2. Review your existing business strategy
No doubt you already have a business strategy that sets out core business goals and activities for the next year or several years. But is it still relevant for the future? Are you sure you have the right strategy in place, given the wave of transformation coming your way? What am I getting at? You need to challenge your existing business strategy.
3. Evaluate your products/services and business processes
As part of reevaluating your business strategy, you’ll also need to revisit your customer value proposition. Value is the keyword there. Ask yourself, “How do we add value for our customers”
4. Priority projects
Having explored your products, services, and internal processes, you should have arrived at a list of potential use cases or projects that you could implement in your organization. This may include things like launching an NFT that accompanies a physical product, creating an immersive metaverse experience for customers, implementing immersive remote working tools, and leveraging generative AI in your product development.
How do you narrow these down and identify which one(s) to focus on first? To start, I recommend identifying one key strategic project that will help the organization deliver its vision. Something that’s 100% aligned with your organizational goals and will deliver significant value. You can have other strategic projects in mind to follow after that but choose one as your top priority.
Naturally, strategic priority projects can take time to execute. So, I also recommend identifying one, two, or even three “quick win” projects. These might be more experimental, or they could be smaller projects that you can pull off in a shorter time, with fewer resources. It’s all good, so long as they add value. Quick-win projects are a low-risk way of testing your ability to execute a digital transformation project — and in the process, your team will build confidence and learn valuable lessons that will feed into your more significant, more strategic projects.
5. Skills plan
You’ll no doubt need to tap into a range of skills to implement your projects. It’s therefore imperative to do a skills audit in order to identify your skills gaps and consider how you will address those gaps.
6. Potential partners
If you don’t have the necessary internal skills and can’t hire people with those skills (which may or may not include freelancers), what can you do? Well, you can acquire companies with the necessary skills, you can form partnerships with other companies, or you can work with the many external consultants who offer services in these areas.
7. Define success
It’s vital you define measures of success for your future projects. This may include tangible goals (for example, a certain number of visitors), less tangible goals (such as improving skills in a certain area), milestones, and of course, metrics that will help you track measures of success. In other words, this step is all about articulating impact (so, what do you want to get out of your project?) and then identifying how you will measure that impact.
8. Governance
Digital transformation governance is important because it ensures that the digital transformation initiatives for your organization are aligned with its business goals and objectives, and are executed effectively and efficiently.
9. Identify your technology needs
You might be surprised to see technology come last in the plan, but that’s very deliberate. In fact, it’s how I approach any future technology strategy. You should always work through your goals, vision, wider business strategy, core projects, skills, ROI metrics, and ethical considerations before you even think about investing in new technologies. Never go straight to technology to solve your business challenges.
