As businesses start to recognize that mobile, cloud, social media, virtualization and big data are more than buzz words and hot topics, it is now the time to adopt work processes that leverage digital technologies to add business value. However, many companies are still not truly digital from inside. For example, a company may have begun to use social media to interact with customers, but have not truly explored how social media can drive differentiation, business growth, and innovation.
Every business is a digital business and those who understand and leverage the benefits will have the most success. As vendors continue to mature the key digital workforce technologies, those technologies uniting into intelligent digital processes, can support a digital workforce to make it smarter, more connected, efficient, and engaged. Supporting effective execution of existing work processes, digital processes can also enable a deeper transformation of work processes, making a range of new work design options feasible.
Digital processes are designed to generate insightful information and to allow businesses to leverage that information so it is useful to the workforce. Digital technologies, operating on rich digital models, are used to make smarter decisions, to better coordinate with colleagues, to react to the changing conditions more quickly, and manage the complexities more effectively.
Five digital technologies that play key roles in making a business digital:
Collaboration Technologies: This includes enterprise social networking, as well as tools for collaborative authoring, content sharing and coordination of distributed teams.
Digital Process Management tools: CRMs and other workflow and task management tools to automate processes, making them more systematic while eliminating paper and manual emails.
Real-time collaboration technologies: For a richer remote presence using tools such instant messaging, group chats, whiteboard collaboration, application sharing, video and audio conferencing.
Analytics and intelligent assistants: This turns data into insights about internal processes and the external ecosystem.
Mobile Interfaces: To work in combination with all of the tools to make information and applications available when and where needed.
Building processes that operate on digital models, with support from some of these tools, can amplify the cognitive, collaborative and even physical capabilities of the workforce, thereby enabling new work designs that can have significant cost and quality benefits.
The opportunity to advance the digital workforce is here.
Companies have the ability to master the individual technologies and determine how to effectively weave them into day-to-day applications and processes.
However, there are still obstacles that companies need to overcome including gaps in the technology stack and putting the available technologies together to improve their processes. As the existing or ready-to-use products are not generally designed to explicitly support the process re-design options, companies need a dedicated team which works toward these transformational change. As a result, organizations may shy away from investing in this area, or limit their effort to the incremental digitization of existing processes rather than deeper transformation.
This is where a digital partner plays a key role in filling the gap and providing solutions as per the business requirement. It will get these tools and technologies designed and customized for your business. Having an outsourced digital partner, will not only shape up the transformation process but will also take away the burden of involving your resources in implementing the change.
So it’s the time to take a call and be digital!