After a series of failures, are companies prepared to go online more effortlessly? Source: Shutterstock

After a series of failures, are companies prepared to go online more effortlessly? Source: Shutterstock

Digital transformation 2.0: Are companies going digital more effortlessly?

BUSINESS leaders have been championing digital transformation projects for almost a decade now. Unfortunately, many of them have been nothing but massive failures — with plenty of lessons about how not to go digital.

From GE’s transformation challenges that made headlines back in 2011 and ultimately ousted its CEO to TSB Bank’s botched “upgrade” that got its senior management in trouble with stakeholders, customers, and regulators in the UK, digital transformation has been messy and largely unsuccessful.

According to experts, between 70 and 80 percent of all transformation efforts fail. Well, it seems as though CEOs and business leaders got wiser in 2019 and learned their lessons.

In the initial days, when cloud computing and storage were the most promising technology, migrating to the cloud was a big pain and was one of the most disastrous things for an organization.

Leaders usually felt that returns and benefits promised to them were not delivered when they moved to the cloud, making the entire exercise futile.

However, over time, they learned that better planning not only helped leverage the cloud more effectively but also allowed the organization to understand the process of technology deployment better.

Today, most organizations have migrated to the cloud in some fashion, and are trying to optimize their cloud deployments to not only suit applications but also to tap into big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and even machine learning.

Overall, digital transformation isn’t very complicated. The key is planning effectively. Of course, it still involves managing people, processes, and divisions, but there’s a demand among employees in the business which also makes things easier.

In the past year or so, banks, insurers, and even retail companies have been doing a lot better with digital transformation.

From deploying chatbots to delight customers to creating mobile apps and augmented reality solutions to better engage with them, to creating more synergy internally through smarter and more seamless communication systems, companies are going from strength to strength with technology.

If it isn’t obvious, we’re entering a new era of digital transformation, one where employees, stakeholders, and business leaders understand that there’s a demand from customers and know that resisting the change will not only put their careers at risk but also spell doom for their the company.

In 2020, more companies are expected to use new and emerging technology solutions — but it’s not just the spending that will go up. The rate of success for digital transformation projects is on the rise and that’s a trend that delights business leaders just as much as it does any customer.