Digital Transformation is a phrase that appears in many 2021 Organisational Strategy Plans. The speed at which Digital Transformation is being adopted was incredible pre the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the outbreak in 2020, the speed of adoption has gone supersonic.
The drive behind Digital Transformation was originally motivated by cost-savings, efficiency, and the need to be able to compete with competitors in ever more digital landscapes. However, it quickly gained extra momentum internally, when localized teams suddenly became distributed teams, almost overnight.
An over-night need to accelerate Digital Transformation
Teams all across the world, used to working next to their workmates, were sprung into physical isolation. Some without even having the chance to take their sandwich out of the office fridge. Physical meetings were no longer an option and what were the agreed steps that were on the planning whiteboard in the office?
At the drop of the hat organisations needed to be able to change how they worked and needed to better adopt the digital technologies they already had access to or to find new ones.
The Importance of Coordination in Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is a very good thing. It can make businesses become more efficient, be more resilient to sudden needs of change, and make them more accessible as an organization to their customers. However, without good Coordination, much like anything else, Digital Transformation can become problematic.
Without overall, organisation wide Coordination in Digital Transformation you are opening the opportunity too:
- Departments implementing different systems, or even the same systems on separate (isolated ) accounts.
- A surge in the number of active systems.
- Data distributed across multiple systems needlessly.
- Increased risk.
- Increased cost.
- Inconsistency in security and data standards.
- Wasted time using and learning multiple systems.
Take a fictional company, ‘Boxworth’ as an example. ‘Boxworth’ is a made-up logistics company that has a small fleet of vehicles. Pre-covid their client information was stored in a local Excel file.
Thrown in to working remotely the Office Administrator decided it was time to move from an Excel document to a CRM in order to eep a better watch on how their team was engaging with exisiting customers. After some research, the Office Administrator signed up to Salesforce. However, its not only the Office Administrators team that uses the excel document. Marketing also use it, as do Sales. Sales have already been looking into a CRM to manage deals and have just signed up to Hubspot. Marketing has already started using Mail Chimp to send our newsletters and has decided to sign up to Insightly.
You see the problem. Although each team is likely to have what they need, in reality, a better, more efficient, and more cost-effective solution could have been implemented.
Consider a Company Wide Digital Transformation Coordinator Role
You might already have this in the form of an Operations Coordinator or through team Operations Managers such as CSOps or RevenueOps etc. However to ensure your digital landscape is efficient, cost-effective, secure and consistent, I would certainly recommend you have a centralised view on Digital Transformation throughout your organisation.
FInally, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please comment below or get in touch.