Digital transformation has a tremendous effect on all sectors of society, especially economies. Companies now are given a chance to drastically alter their business models by employing new digital technologies: social networks, software solutions, big data, blockchain, and many other innovative technologies can boost any business!
But when talking about those advancements, top managers and leaders often focus on IT infrastructure, technologies, and applications. That is only part of the equation.
While the technology itself is an important component of the equation, digital transformation is also about people and their mindsets. The essential part of digital transformation is changing the way employees and managers approach business problems and where they look to find solutions.
Let’s look at how digital transformation can promote a mindset change in companies.
Without further ado, let’s dive into it!
Adaptiveness
We are in an era where technology, whether artificial intelligence-powered or not, can improve business operations and make companies more efficient. However for digital transformation efforts to be successful, organizations need to help employees transition to a new way of doing things.
Major surveys show that by 2030, 14% of the global workforce -- as many as 375 million workers -- will need to change their jobs or acquire new skills due to automation and AI. In addition, many business managers fear workforce skills gaps in the next few years.
To address those issues caused by digital transformation, companies are becoming more adaptive (we can claim that adaptiveness is a new competitive advantage), and they know that the better they can adapt, the higher are chances of success. Ever-changing and evolving technologies encourage managers and employees to adapt to new, fluctuating realities by mastering new skills.
Because of digital transformation, successful companies have built up skills in managing complex multi-stakeholder systems in an increasingly interconnected world.
But to adapt to a changing environment, organizations must learn to notice the signals of change, effectively decode them and act quickly to upgrade their business models.
Wind of Change
Digital transformation encourages companies to listen to every signal of the forthcoming change. In the information-saturated era, when data is available simultaneously to all competitors, companies must make sure that employees can detect, understand and act according to signals of change.
Before the digital transformation era, it was comparably easy for many executives to identify in what industry and with which companies they’re competing. But when the environment is so unpredictable, companies must analyze the changing environment and plan their strategies accordingly.
Innovative Thinking and Experimentation
No matter how good the company is at forecasting and foreseeing changes, not everything can be deduced from the signal analysis. But when that is impossible, things can be discovered through experimentation.
In the past, experiments were very costly for businesses. In addition, a failed project can damage a company’s reputation. But thanks to digital transformation, many successful organizations use innovative approaches and technologies to test new ideas.
For instance, many auto industry giants use the virtual environment (VR) to experiment easily with the look and build of a vehicle before commissioning costly prototypes. BMW, Jaguar, and other leading companies are using VR to save millions by reducing the number of prototypes needed to design a vehicle.
Reduced Fear of Failure
Innovative approaches and experimentation necessarily produce failure. Companies that embrace digital transformation are very tolerant of failure, and they know well enough that because of the changing and highly unpredictable environment mistakes are inevitable.
However, those companies also know that mistakes and failures can lead to ground-breaking success. And because they are flexible and easily adaptive to changes, failure becomes a normal part of the business process.
If the company can document what it has learned from the failure, executives and employees can use the valuable knowledge and insights for future projects.
Conclusion
Already a strategic initiative, digital transformation has taken on heightened importance in the wake of Coronavirus.
Companies’ adoption of digital technologies has sped up not only by the COVID 19 pandemic but also because of fear of being outflanked by competitors. Digital transformation marks a rethinking of how an organization uses technology, people, and processes in search of new business models.
Yet, as we have mentioned earlier, digital transformation is not only about technologies. It changes the mindset, priorities, and executives and their companies’ attitudes. And who knows, maybe, in the end, altered mindsets have an even bigger impact on business success than technology.
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