How to implement the Digital Transformation in your Company

We talk a lot about Digital Transformation, but not everyone knows what it really is. It started from customers’ needs to be provided with more products and services in shorter time and to be different from competitors involving and assisting the customer along its purchase journey. In this situation, the rapidity of change is one of the major obstacles to overcome.

Every day, new actors appear on the market, the Start-ups, with their new offering never existed before, but essential for customers now. This is one of the reasons why the largest and oldest companies have to leave their traditional business models and adapt to the new fast Time To Market, becoming real Software House with innovative strategies and methodologies.

Companies have to implement their transformation to digital not only concerning their processes but also in their internal culture, in the way of thinking, to increase their agility with little everyday steps.

In this sense, Digital Transformation in an unstoppable process, it’s not something that you have to implement, it is something that is inevitably happening to people and to companies.

The biggest mandatory step consists in Agile methodologies implementation – that make development process faster thanks to the high frequency of application releases, they also reduce bugs and make software always work with high performances -, in Cloud usage, in the digital infrastructures addition to physical infrastructures, - taking traditional complexities off to make processes more agile, faster, smarter and to manage complexities with less effort – all of this in the DevOps point of view.

So, how can we implement this transformation process in the easiest way? According to experts, the secret is to be focused on the competitive advantages that you can reach. Let’s see the two main steps you must consider before adopting the Digital Transformation in your company.

THE STRATEGY

First of all, you have to think about the strategy you want to use, choose an expert partner to avoid mistakes that can undermine your company.

The questions we must ask ourselves are:

• What is the path that must be followed?
• What is our main goal?
• How soon do we want to reach it?
• How many tests will be set during this change? And when?

THE BARRIERS

Before starting the process, it is fundamental to evaluate all the risks and obstacles that might occur, to be able to avoid or easily manage them. Let’s see the 5 most important barriers:

1. Manual process Vs. Automation. Companies velocity is undermined by manual processes, which are slower than digital ones. Without the automation support to drive internal processes we are required to link them manually hampering the creation of a complete company plan aimed at obtaining a competitive advantage.
2. Strict Vs. Fluid Systems. Most of companies have internal strict processes difficult to be renewed, especially in Italy. Data collected by analysts say that 80% of IT investments are intended for maintain old systems instead of replacing them. The problem is that changing only few parts of the internal process is not enough to be competitive, we have to change the whole machine to achieve the best performances.
3. Big Data. A lot has been said about big data, as fundamentals for business innovation, over the last years. The most important thing is to understand how to use them in our company, because they can help us to improve the customer experience and our offering only if they are shared within the company.
4. Mobile. According to Forrester data, 86% of digital sector total growth between 2017 and 2022 will be by Mobile. This means that mobile sales will increase by 16,7% during the same period and devices will become the most important means of sales on which we have to focus.
5. Security. Cyber-attacks are increasingly frequent, so it is very important to be prepared for and fight them. The basic steps consist in analyse and understand which is the weak point that is more likely to be attacked by hackers and then we have to ensure fast and agile procedures because security can’t be strict or complex.

To summarize, strategy and barriers are the first steps to start our digital transformation journey, where DevOps – the methodology applicable to IT department but also to the whole company, concerning practices, cultural and values review to improve collaboration between Developers and Operations, aimed to the creation of high-performing software – is a key part. If you want to learn more about it, download our free guide.