Digital technology has changed the way people interact and to do business. Customers expect seamless omnichannel experiences across all touch points with a business, employees expect an easy to use and integrated process that improve their working efficiency, and businesses expect technology to improve profitability while delivering better products and service quality.
The digital experience is not a onetime upgrade event, such as adding a new a website or a new mobile application to existing channels. Users interacting with systems expect a pleasant user experience and hence there is a need for business to be holistically reviewed for a seamless experience, irrespective of channel they choose. This user experience requires that business processes should blend well to add value to the overall delivery of the product or service.
Technology is only an enabler to automate business processes that have already been reengineered to be effective. Automating an inefficient set of business processes just retains the inefficiency and may just magnify it. There is a need to first optimize the processes and then automate. This optimization calls for the use of best practice process and benchmarking to ensure that the company is effective compared with peers in the industry. Digital technology may even eliminate non value adding processes or automate the routine tasks thus freeing bandwidth for move value added activity or processes, with less errors and more speed, thus enhancing the overall customer satisfaction.
Since a company’s business processes and technologies has evolved over, there is a need to continually review, change or adapt to new ways of transacting business, in line with micro and macro factors impacting the business. With a good knowledge of how the business of the future should look like, considering customer expectations, new business models, competitive factors, and rapidly changing digital concepts and technology, a successful digital transformation entails first taking a holistic view of the business process and creating a seamless user experience. A holistic business process reengineering or optimization exercise challenges the ‘traditional’ mindset, and needs a clear vision and collaboration across departments.
Emerging Technologies has placed a lot of focus on the digital technology part of digital transformation. However without first making the underlines way of doing business, or business model, or set of processes more effective and optimized, there will be limited or even negative impact with using the sophisticated digital technology.
Organizations are making large investments in IT to improve customer experience, gain efficiencies and reduce risks. These investments are not only being evaluated on ROI but also on their impact on customers and business processes. The technology ecosystem is continuously evolving and if used effectively and where relevant, along with a wholistic review of the optimization of the impacted business processes, can help reduce the total cost of ownership, improve the quality of services, and reflect on the bottom line.
