The concept of “digital transformation” is a complex one, and its meaning varies from business to business and even from team to team. At its heart though, digital transformation relates to any organisation seeking to review and reshape its operations around the opportunities and constraints that digital technologies present, to deliver added value for users and make core business processes more streamlined and friction-free.

Touching on every aspect of a business from strategic investment, digital marketing and recruitment decisions through to day-to-day communications and tasks, digital transformation initiatives typically involve large development projects, as organisations upgrade legacy systems and introduce new platforms in order to become more digitally-focused.

No matter what industry you operate in or the business model you employ, it’s likely that your organisation has been impacted by digital technologies. In addition to this, today’s consumers are influenced by leaders in customer experience and customer service from across a wide range of industries, making it important that organisations benchmark themselves against brands such as Amazon, Apple and Google, as well as their nearest competitors.

Digital transformation should therefore be a key consideration for virtually any organisation, and especially those providing important information and services to a wide and diverse audience. For example, the finance industry has seen huge shifts towards digital transformation in recent years – driven in part by the rise of digital-only ‘challenger’ banks – while we work closely with organisations in the housing association sector, such as ateb, to optimise core service delivery for tenants.

Digital transformation is not a one-time event. Rather, though a successful digital transformation will likely require that you make fundamental changes to the way you operate, it also demands that you continue making changes in order to keep pace with the ever-evolving digital world.

As such, it’s important that companies regularly review their digital capabilities for transformation opportunities no matter where they are on their transformation journey. The outputs from these reviews can then be used to inform a long-term strategic digital roadmap, as well as identifying ‘quick wins’ that can help deliver rapid improvements across your services.

This is particularly relevant as the rate of technological change continues to increase – meaning that once cutting-edge innovations can quickly become expected features and functionality, and requiring organisations to react accordingly.

As digital transformation strategies look different for every organisation – depending on their current capabilities, business model, audience demographics, and strategic goals and objectives – there is no single approach to it.

To ensure any investment is targeted to deliver maximum value though, discovery activities should play a key role in the early stages of your digital transformation journey. Providing a shared understanding of your current situation and informing a clear future vision, this phase gives you a valuable head-start going into any subsequent development projects, while also helping secure buy-in.

Digital transformation initiatives can range from delivering a new website, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or self-service portal, through to reviewing the legacy processes that sit at the heart of your organisation and making fundamental changes to the products and services you provide, as well as how you deliver these to your audience.

Throughout, it’s vitally important that you also consider the cultural aspects of your digital transformation programme, coaching your team in the skills they need to work in a more customer-centric and focused way, while also implementing change management processes to bring teams on board and safeguard sustainable transformation.

There are many benefits available to organisations that invest in digital transformation. Streamlining and automating business-critical processes can deliver significant efficiencies, freeing up staff to focus on increasing value and driving innovation. Additionally, digital transformation strategies often also support the integration of previously disparate systems, joining up data to provide a holistic picture of your customers and helping you identify gaps or areas of friction to be addressed.

Crucially, embracing digital technology innovations can enable you to better serve your customers, providing an intuitive, enjoyable and helpful user experience that helps increase satisfaction and engagement and positively impacts your bottom-line. Digital transformation also supports the creation of more customer-centric business processes and culture, improving your ability to serve your users at every level.

With the potential rewards of digital transformation clear to see, it can be considered a must for any organisation looking to achieve or retain competitive advantage and keep pace with changing customer demands and behaviours. However, many businesses remain reluctant to invest in digital transformation strategies, due to the perceived cost and risk associated with these initiatives.

What is clear though is that digital is now a central means of communicating with and serving users – not to mention empowering workforces – and that digital technologies will only continue to grow in importance and complexity. Organisations that fail to keep up with this pace of change will therefore quickly find themselves unable to react to new demands and opportunities, and face increased expense and disruption when trying to upgrade their legacy systems and processes.

It is a must then that organisations regularly review their capabilities to ensure they are aligned with user expectations and business requirements, making changes as needed to address gaps and capitalise on new opportunities as part of an on-going process of digital transformation.

Every digital transformation journey is different and as such we’ll work with you to define a programme of work tailored to your specific needs and goals, employing a collaborative and iterative approach proven over hundreds of successfully-delivered digital transformation projects:

Following sign-off we can agree a series of check-in points to measure success, and refine your digital strategy and tactics as needed in response to current needs and new opportunities.

Firstly, we’ll arrange an initial consultation to get an overview of your requirements, objectives and any pain points, and explore where and how our digital transformation services can deliver you the greatest value.

We’ll then hold a kick-off session to introduce Box UK team members to relevant stakeholders from across your business, and confirm any strategic goals, success criteria and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

This will inform a detailed requirements gathering phase, where our analysts and consultants will capture the ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ picture of your digital services. Activities here may include stakeholder workshops, user surveys, operational process mapping, and technical reviews of your code and digital ecosystem.

You’ll be presented with a clearly-defined digital transformation strategy and roadmap, detailing short, medium and long-term activities and covering your development requirements, process improvements and any additional cultural considerations needed to support you in your journey.

Where there are multiple options available to deliver the outcomes you need, Box UK will detail the benefits and any disadvantages of these along with indicative implementation costs (your strategy and roadmap can also be used to guide implementation by your in-house team should you choose).

We may also recommend an initial prototyping phase to validate assumptions and technical decisions, and throughout delivery of your programme of work we’ll work iteratively to make all progress highly visible.

We’ve supported numerous high-profile organisations suffering from information and data silos, long lead times for project delivery and an inability to exploit new opportunities in an efficient manner, delivering digital strategy consulting services across industries including:

Ecommerce

Public Sector

Finance

Education

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