Technology has changed the way we do many things and business is no exception. Gone are the days when brick and mortar stores were the only way to establish a business. Today, you can start an online business or turn your offline business into an online business by digitally transforming it. 

Digital transforming your business has its perks and perils. It is important to understand different stages involved in digital transformation to convert your offline business into an online one successfully. By developing a better understanding of different stages involved in digitally transforming your business, you can prioritize digital transformation initiatives, develop efficient processes and models and get all the stakeholders on the same page.

Moreover, you can create a sense of urgency to accelerate digital transformation and get actionable marketing insights that will help you tailor your marketing campaigns in a better way. You can even customize the models to achieve specific goals and give a new direction to your company.

If you want to know the different stages involved in digital transformation, you are at the right place. In this article, you will learn about six stages of digital transformation.

Business As Usual

During the first stage, businesses follow a tried and tested formula with no or less room for experimentation. They have devised their goals and set perspective about customers, processes, key performance indicators and business models. They don’t want to change that because of their rigid mindset. That is exactly when digital transformation comes into play. In order to digitally transform your business, you will have to change that rigid mindset and adopt a flexible approach. In today’s rapidly evolving business world, you need dynamic solutions that adjust according to your business needs. 

Present and Active

During this stage of digital transformation, you should conduct few experiments in order to gauge whether it works or not. If these experiments bring out the best from your team and your organization moves one step closer to its goal then your experiment is successful and you should expand it throughout the organization. Focus on improving specific processes and touch points to enhance the effectiveness of your business during this stage.

In quest to digitize your organization, you can buy dedicated server to handle spike in traffic more smartly and deliver a better user experience to users. That move pays off and you manage to successfully convince your higher management about its return on investment. Now, you can buy more servers and create a network of servers throughout your organization and achieve better results you are getting. Make sure you conduct experiments in a real world scenario so when you implement it on a large scale, it delivers the results you are looking for.

Formalized

As you move to this stage, you become more adventurous with experimentation so much so that it almost becomes habitual and intentional. This is where you start to take bolder decisions that could transform your business. When experimentation becomes a habit, you tend to conduct those experiments with more confidence thus leading to a higher success rate. This is where you start to see results. You might need executive support during this phase to get all the new resources and technology to successfully complete this phase of digital transformation. 

Andrew Vaz, CIO of Deloitte summed it up brilliantly when he said, “In today’s world of exponential change, organizations that get too comfortable with the status quo are at major risk of disruption. If you’re not experimenting and, as a director, if you’re not asking questions about how your organization is navigating and plugging into disruption, forming new ecosystems, and tapping into open markets, then your organization is at risk. In the area of talent alone, if you’re not leveraging talent outside your organization, you’ll never win the war of ideas because the smartest people in the world don’t work for you.”

Strategic

During this phase, different departments and units collaborate with one another and share actionable insights that everyone can benefit from. This way, you get many different perspectives and angles. If you are lucky enough, you can also get many solutions to the same problems as most departments see things from a different perspective. This leads to the creation of new strategic roadmaps. At this point, roles are defined, investments are planned and tasks are assigned. Make sure you create a digital transformation strategy by considering all the factors that could hamper your progression towards success.

Converged

After getting all the strategic aspects out of the way, now it is time to form a dedicated team that will drive your digital transformation strategy to success. Make sure that the team is focused on business and customer centric goals and manage operations accordingly. This is where a new organization structure starts to form. Roles, processes, expertise, models and system supporting transformation are in its place. At this stage, you are all set to digitally transform your business and reap its real benefits.

Innovative and Adaptive

During the last stage, your digital transformation efforts start to bear fruit. This is the stage where top level executives see the real benefits of digital transformation and agree that change is the only constant. Digital transformation becomes an integral part of your business. A completely new ecosystem is put together that identifies market trends and act upon them with the help of technology. Initially, that ecosystem is limited but later it was implemented at scale throughout the organization offering them the ability to take the right action at the right time.

In today’s fast changing business world, the ability to get useful insights, act on it in a timely fashion and achieve the desired results is a big asset. Businesses that follow a proactive approach are usually the ones that succeed in today’s dynamic business world. Digital transformation can help you do that and achieve success.

Which process do you follow when digitally transforming your business? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.