Your first step to digital transformation

meeting

Written by Claire McNally, Principle Consultant, Neueda

If there’s one certainty in digital transformation, it’s that it can only be successful if implemented across the entirety of an organisation. As such, identifying the best place to start on such an all-encompassing project can be overwhelming for many organisations. Let’s break it down…

Components of transformation

A digital transformation process consists of four key elements:

  1. Your business
  2. Your applications
  3. Your data
  4. Your technology

In this post, we’re focusing on the first stage, which involves you examining your business with regards to who you are, what you do, who you do it with and your position within the marketplace.

Business capabilities

Start by examining and mapping out each of the activities you need to carry out as part of your everyday operations. This journey will differ from business to business and could encompass research to distribution, marketing to customer service, sales to billing, or all of the above!

Use this opportunity to analyse every service needed to fulfil these activities, ensuring that you focus on how these services are used by your customers, then consider your organisational structure and how it’s set up to deliver them. After completing this exercise, you’ll be best-placed to explore how best to transform your business digitally.

Creating a coherent digital experience

It’s vital to start building a digital experience that’s as seamless as human interaction, if not more. The purpose of this stage is to analyse what you’re doing well, where the gaps are in your offering and to define a clear vision for the short, medium and long-term future.

A recent project we undertook for a major public sector education service provider demonstrates the value of the business stage.  The organisation didn’t have effective control of its school admissions process, instead relying heavily on staff dealing with paper-based admission processes and their customers interacting mainly via paper. We carried out an in-depth assessment, via a series of meetings and workshops with key stakeholders and employees, to determine the problems with the current process and how it could be improved in the future. It was a critical stage of the project and enabled our team to fully understand every aspect of the admissions process, its structure, how it functions and the services it delivers.

From this point, we built a customised digital roadmap to move post-primary school applications from paper to online; reducing paper volumes, integrating with key systems and enabling continuous improvement of a new digital service. The roadmap was phased to ensure the organisation could break down a complex set of requirements into achievable chunks of work.

What this tells us

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the initial comprehensive analysis of the business and it’s users. Simply put, without having an acute understanding of your organisation right now, you can’t build a digital roadmap that’s robust enough for the future.

Stay tuned to the Neueda blog to find out more about step 2 of a digital transformation project, which will see you assessing the applications required to run your business and the pivotal role they play in your digital future.

Help is at hand

Neueda is currently offering a free Digital Acceleration Workshop where public sector leaders get the chance to take part in a facilitated creative process to generate, develop and communicate ideas.  By the end of the 2 hours everyone will:

  • Have a strong understanding of the problems.
  • Generate ideas to solve the problem.
  • Prioritise ideas by effort and value.

Originally posted here

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