The pandemic has played a big part in accelerating digital transformation efforts at enterprises. It speeded up the adoption of digital technologies by several years, transforming businesses forever. Digital adoption and the digitisation of customer and supply-chain interactions have taken a quantum leap at both the organisational and industry level.
Moreover, it has helped business leaders realise that technology has strategic importance as a critical business component, especially in the current hypercompetitive economic environment. The recent Pulse Survey by PwC backs the fact by highlighting that 60 per cent of business executives consider digital transformation as their most critical growth driver in 2022.
Some reports suggest global spending on digital transformation efforts is projected to reach $2.8 trillion by 2025, highlighting that corporate decision-makers now understand the benefits of undertaking digital transformation efforts.
However, digital transformation requires a clear vision, the right kind of tech talent and intricate coordination of tech operations with digital and business partners. That is why it can be a strenuous activity for any company, especially for legacy firms, businesses lacking specific technical expertise, or companies with limited tech bandwidth to move to the next level.
This is one among many reasons organisations need strategic partnerships for fostering technology innovation. As a matter of fact, reports suggest that as many as 88 per cent of businesses take the help of third-party providers for at least one component of their digital transformation.
Such partnerships can facilitate digital transformation and help businesses avoid making unnecessary mistakes to save time and money.
Digital transformation is not just modernising your business for survival. It’s also about having the foresight to adapt your business to positively impact various aspects such as employee productivity, operations, consumer experience and leadership.
Some other reasons why businesses need to adopt digital transformation include:
- Getting more data-based insights to enable informed decision making
- Boosting collaboration across departments
- Improving agility and innovation
But there are some challenges
While digital transformation might seem like the obvious choice, implementing it might not be straightforward. As discussed earlier, it can be a strenuous activity.
As a business leader, you are bound to face some challenges in your digital transformation journey, and these challenges will not always be tech-related. They’ll also include people-centric issues, organisational structures, and many other non-tech factors.
Some other challenges businesses commonly face during digital transformation include:
- Organisational silos leading to disconnected decision-making
- A risk-averse organisational culture
- Legacy systems
- Digital skill gap
- Cyber-security risks
- Budget constraints
- Shortage of technical resources
- Continuous evolution of customer needs
- Lack of a proper digital transformation strategy
With some of these factors being beyond your control, the challenges may seem overwhelming at first. But you can take some steps to overcome them. More importantly, you can work with strategic technology partners who would help you face these challenges.
A digital partner can be your tower of strength when tackling digital transformation challenges. They can also bring new perspectives, ideas, suggestions and points of view to enrich your project.
Some other benefits of working with such partners include reduced risk, expanded technology expertise, greater access to IT support, implementation of newer technology solutions and better employee performance.
But choosing a technology partner is a different ball game.
Finding the right technology partner
You must look beyond the industry buzzwords and go deeper to uncover the real value a technology partner brings to the table. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is their experience in your industry?
- What skills do they have?
- How successful have their past collaborations been?
- What processes do they have in place?
If they can answer these questions easily, it’s probably the right place to begin.
Every company’s operations are unique and thus require an equally unique digital transformation plan. The right transformation consultants will consider a company’s distinctive business processes to uncover where and how digital intervention can improve business outcomes.
So to find a true digital partner invested in your organisation’s success, you must look for consultants that prefer to take a personalised approach toward your digital transformation efforts and align their objectives with your company’s business goals.
Look for partners who take a personalised inside-out approach and begin the digital transformation strategy with a structured analysis of your organisation’s situation.
A well-rounded approach will consider understanding current operations, past experiences with implementing change, and the knowledge of tools and processes of your company’s employees to ensure they are on the same page with the digital transformation plan.
The right consulting team would clarify — at the beginning — the business outcomes they aim to achieve for their customers.
Company values and culture are also important factors to look for in your technology partner. A company doing well internally will extend its values externally to its client relationships as well.
Agility in implementing digital transformation is another key factor that makes for a great technology partner.
Finally, a digital transformation consultant truly invested in your company’s long-term success will introduce an exit strategy. The right technology partner will create a plan to teach your business the skills to sustain on your own, no matter how complex the digital transformation process is.
Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP) is one such strategic technology solutions firm providing exceptional digital transformation consulting and software/data engineering services.
The company takes pride in being a value-driven, woman-owned business focused on helping people, companies and communities attain long-term success.
“During our 15-year presence in the market, our goal has been to create a company focused on two objectives: create an environment so exceptional that people would want to work here throughout their careers, and focus on providing so much value to our clients that they couldn’t imagine working with another technology firm,” says Joyce Durst, CEO and co-founder of GAP.
Being a boutique firm, GAP can deliver the same results as any big consulting firm out there, only much faster. As an independent and trusted advisor, GAP can deliver architectural design and frameworks as part of a next generation roadmap, or design decision support reports that offer weighted insights and recommendations.
Moreover, along with consulting services, the company offers an extensive array of software and data engineering delivery services, helping businesses build engineering teams that become a part of their business. GAP’s delivery services showcase engineering expertise in several areas, including:
- Software development for cloud and mobile applications
- Data analytics and data science
- Information systems
- Machine learning
- Predictive modeling
- QA and QA automation
“GAP provides full-cycle software development to technically architect and implement solutions. The fact that we have expertise in providing both consulting and delivery services is definitely among our key strengths. We not only consult clients on a viable digital transformation strategy, but also build teams to implement it. So, we can single-handedly complete projects. We want to empower our clients to give more focus on their business operations, since we take care of the technology side of things,” says Jocelyn Sexton, VP of Marketing at GAP.
Reprinted with permission from Business Reporter.