Digital transformation is no longer an option. Increasingly, the market forces this on you too. They change the way you engage with your clients, with your partners, and with the work you do. They force on you a different way of working in teams and departments. VoIP doesn’t just save money compared to traditional phone lines. G Suite doesn’t just offer you a lot more tools than a Selectric. It is multi-faceted and diffuse, and doesn’t just involve technology.’ Davenport and George Westerman write in HBR, ‘digital is not just a thing that you can buy and plug into the organization. When you move from the electric typewriter, the fax machine and the phone to G Suite or Office 365, Slack and email, and VoIP, you don’t seek a direct digital equivalent to the old tools, because there isn’t one.
But merely digitizing the processes you already have isn’t digital transformation. Why digital transformation mattersĭigital transformation is the process of moving an organization's assets and processes from analog to digital substrates. In this post, we’ll look at the importance of a digital transformation roadmap, consider the most common shortcomings, and explain why we think a two to three year digital transformation roadmap works best for most businesses. The average digital transformation roadmap is too long and unwieldy to guide companies through a process that can involve multiple recalibrations to stay on track amid changing markets, technologies and regulatory environments. In many cases, companies don’t have a roadmap at all! Where they do, it’s often not doing what it should for them.
But they’re misunderstood, and often misapplied. Roadmaps are crucial to the success of digital transformation projects.