Digital Transformation is Human Transformation
Digital technology has only presently gained significance. E-commerce was a mere 4% of retail sales. Cloud and mobile computing were only just starting and AI (Artificial Intelligence) seemed to be ‘science’ fiction’. Now they have become a key to marketing and turned out to be ‘necessary’. There is no choice but to accept and adapt technology, or else the business suffers.
It is important to ensure that an organization is well prepared to adapt this new technology. Here is what a business owner needs to focus on.
Objectives of a Business
Most businesses tend to focus on the technology and not on the business goals. Digital transformation benefits a business to a great extent, but a business needs to be in the know of the business objectives. Only moving to the cloud or even developing the AI capabilities is the wrong approach.
Businesses start by implementing a specific technical approach that might not be useful to the employees or the front-line managers. There is no ROI (Return on Investment) or even real adoption.
One needs to start by asking questions that are related to their business. Serving the customer through a flexible and faster technology needs to be looked into, or how could AI transform the specific business.
Shift the Business and Business Model
Digital transformation and innovation is definitely important for any business, but making a major shift to technology for only a part of the business and keeping the rest intact is a big mistake.
Before a business shifts to the cloud, it needs to strategize how to deploy the resources in a productive manner. A business might need to reconfigure the way the people have been organized and also need a number of different skills in many different places.
The shifts made need to concentrate on how to open up new markets and also serve the customers in a better manner. The technological shift needs to focus on the results of the business.
Automating the Tedious Tasks
A big mistake made by most businesses is trying to replace humans with technology only to save costs. A business needs to empower and augment people instead so that their performance is better and they can add value.
Technology needs to be used to improve the efficiency of people. When humans combine their efforts with machines, the error rate is only 0.5%.
Human collaboration with Machines
With the changing times, the nature of work has also changed. Most of the time spent is interacting with other people as compared to working at the desk. The value has now shifted to social skills and not cognitive skills. Collaboration is a competitive advantage.
For example, when the automated teller machines were introduced in 1970, people pictured fewer tellers and branches. What has happened is the opposite. Presently, there are twice as many bank tellers. This is because they do things that cannot be done by machines, like showing empathy or solving tough problems.
In short, any technological transformation is human transformation. Work of high value involves human collaboration with other humans. It is important to ensure the human part is correct so the technology part can follow suit.
id4org helps organizations to bring down the costs of operation, increase the inclusivity and productivity, and also enhance competitiveness and agility and improve collaboration at an affordable price.
