Why do you need a Digital Transformation Roadmap (Can’t you simply Start Moving)?
Your digital transformation roadmap isn’t a thorough set of scripted mandates. It is a suggestion and plan to keep the organization moving towards its business goals. When identifying and prioritizing potential projects/activities, you must remember three indications to guide your decisions:
How well the activity aligns with the roadmap (Is it moving you in the proper direction?)
Most projects will generally align with the digital transformation roadmap (or a minimum of that is the claim which is able to be made). Degree of alignment (either a 1–10 scale or a high/medium/low categorization) might be the more meaningful method to gauge alternatives in your investment portfolio. How the activity will move you towards your desired outcome. This may be where the cost/benefit analysis is beneficial. Each activity should have an impact on moving you closer to your digital transformational goals.
What you would like to gauge is: How far will it move you within the specified direction and also the way much will it cost to realize that impact?
No two proposed projects will have precisely the identical impact or cost, making cost/benefit analysis a strong portfolio-planning tool for digital transformation efforts. How efficiently your resources are being employed to comprehend the desired outcome. Most businesses share the frustration of limited resources like money, people, and time. Often, the identical pool of resources is involved in running your business and contributing to your digital transformation effort. As a result, resource constraints are common, and selecting the best activities to support your digital transformation goals is often a matter of optimizing the employment of accessible resources. This might include selecting projects that maximize ROI, bundling activities that have synergistic opportunities, and considering opportunity costs (the foregone benefits of what you won’t be doing).
By taking these factors into consideration, you’ll not only be able to select the right projects to prioritize and through which to invest but also you will be able to identify easily the projects or activities during which you shouldn’t invest. By removing these activities from consideration, your organization is more focused on delivering changes that add the foremost value to your digital transformation efforts. Often, the quantity invested in supporting initiatives, the number of systems that are modernized or the list of business processes that have changed are how companies measure their digital transformation initiatives. This approach often winds up in underwhelming results, changing fatigue, lost time, and wasted resources.
The impact is how you need to measure progress towards your digital transformation goals. Impacts on products, impacts on processes, impacts on productivity, and impacts on profitability. After you evaluate these metrics, what you would like to figure out is progress towards your digital transformation goals.
Within the roadmap development process, you articulated the target state you are seeking to realize, a way for arriving there, the “big rocks” that you just simply must get in order, and objectives you were expected to complete. These are the goalposts that should be used to measure your progress. In a confined mind, detailed activities and projects will often change during a long-running transformation initiative, but the investments you create should be generating visible and sustainable results that show you are making progress towards your goal.
Adapting because the Environment Changes Your company’s digital transformation will likely require multiple years and your digital transformation roadmap is there to guide you. As business environments and technology change, you’ll find yourself wanting to adjust your digital transformation roadmap to take advantage of the latest opportunities, avoid threats and risks and align them along with your company’s business climate (resources, budgets, priorities, etc.). Rarely will you be able to map the precise course with 100% accuracy at the beginning of the transformation?
Having a clearly defined digital transformation roadmap against which your company is aligning activities could also be helpful when course corrections are required – they allow you to control in a coordinated way. This helps to attenuate disruption to the progress you’ve already achieved. Industry best practice for creating a digital transformation roadmap is changing fast and to be competitive organizations must digitize, modernize and provide customers with new products and services they expect, and update their internal operations to take advantage of the latest technology.
Those companies that try this effectively will achieve significant competitive advantage internal operations in the marketplace additionally as increased profitability from automation and informed decision-making. Developing and implementing a roadmap for your digital transformation effort can significantly increase the likelihood of success to grasp your company’s vision for the long term.
Here are 5 best practices for establishing your digital transformation roadmap: Define what success seems like for your company Separate the prove to be manageable parts Harvest value as you go, instead of waiting until the highest Focus on the impacts on people (culture, process, skills, and organizational change) Adjust course if necessary (the environment is continuously changing).
Without a roadmap, your organization is left to wonder and hope (somehow) it’ll find its due to a positive destination. By creating and activating a roadmap as a guide for your company, you will be able to reach your desired destination and enjoy the benefits that digital transformation offers.