The year 2020 will not easily go unforgotten in the business world; that was when 62% of Americans embarked on remote work; interestingly, it was the first experience for 49% of them. Coronavirus came knocking, and it was an ill wind that didn’t do anybody any good.
There was the need for the global community to fashion out new ways of doing things; measures were hurriedly put in place to safeguard the world and ensure that the global economy didn’t collapse. This measure involved exploiting new technologies; changing organizational cultures and employees’ mindsets.
It was a new dawn for digital transformation. When 77.3% of 100 Fortune 500 CIOs decide to prioritize digital transformation in their budgets, you realize it’s a serious business.
But, plunging headlong into a large-scale digital transformation has serious implications.
What are the Possible Problems you will Encounter while Embarking on a Large-Scale Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process you embark upon to ensure the reimagining of your business through the integration of new technologies and revamping legacy systems to improve business operations. The principal thing that brings about digital transformation is the changing customer expectations.
For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic made people stay away from shops and physical workplaces, for a business to survive these dramatic changes, there is the absolute need to chart new ways of operation. In the process of digitally transforming, you must re-evaluate how you utilize technology, employees, and processes to achieve your business objectives and at the same time, ensure customers’ satisfaction.
A successful digital transformation can lead to new business models and since your customers are happy, you don’t expect churn and your ROI will experience a significant improvement. However, you must know that you can encounter the following problems and put measures in place to mitigate them.
Cybersecurity Issues
The remote work era, or its popular acronym WFH, ensured that employees now need to do a lot of telecommuting; in the process, they have to make use of collaboration tools which was not the case before. In the UK, people had to resort to video communication apps to take part in virtual meetings for work and also socialize with family and friends; this led to the number of daily active users of Zoom reaching an almost unprecedented 1.7 million towards the end of November 2020.
If you extrapolate this number to include global usage, it quickly becomes glaring the huge amount of entry surfaces that were created for cybercriminals. Danny Presten, Chief Methodologist at Digital.ai reported that in 2020, phishing attacks rose by a whopping 600%, ransomware attacks increased by 148%, and the FBI reported a 300% increase in cybercrimes.
Hackers exploited the WFH model to increase their nefarious business. The new technologies that were hurriedly deployed created room for more data in transit; customers’ privacy and security were no longer guaranteed.
Digital transformation has to a great extent enhanced remote work, but several organizations were not prepared for it. The lesson we’ve learned from the pandemic is that upheavals will surface from time to time, and organizations must be proactive.
While we may not completely stop phishing attacks, there are ways we can mitigate them. Unfortunately, the digital transformation initiatives businesses had to embark upon to ensure remote working did not give employees the right tools and necessary training to understand the roles they must play in information security.
Hackers use phishing to collect sensitive information that they can use to access protected data and networks. The easiest way to do this is to embed a link in an email which the employee clicks unknowingly.
There are some other ways, but the most important thing is to educate employees who are working remotely on the signals. Another important thing is to ensure end-to-end encryption, since a lot of devices will be needed for telecommuting.
Resistance to Changes in the Organizational Culture
When employees are onboarded, it is the usual practice of organizations to indoctrinate them on what goes and what the organization does not allow. After some time, employees “live and breathe” these ways of doing things in the company, it becomes their culture.
A radical and sudden change to this culture can elicit pockets of resistance. Remote work is a sudden change; employees need to adjust to coping with affairs in their homes, and at the same time, carry out their tasks.
How this works out to a very large extent depends on the CEO. CEOs are often in a disadvantaged position because they don’t have enough resources to guide them through how they should embark on digital transformation.
They just see the need and must come up with actionable plans. Looking at the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work, if the CEO was not pragmatic, the organization will be among those that won’t reopen.
The CEO must bring the employees around to see the urgency for the digital transformation. They must understand the need for the shift in culture and where it’s necessary, employees must be re-trained to adopt new technologies. It may not be purely the 9 to 5 model anymore. At the end of the day, employees will follow the direction of the CEO.
How does the CEO ensure that roles don’t conflict? Each member of the C-suite as well as other stakeholders must have specific roles to play.
Organizational change has not an exact blueprint, it depends on what the organization wants to achieve and the vision of the CEO. The priority, extensiveness, and urgency the CEO attach to the change will determine how every stakeholder buys into the change. A successful outcome largely depends on the visions of the CEO.
The CEO, in conjunction with the CIO and other executives, must come up with a digital transformation strategy.
Digital Transformation Strategy
You can’t embark on digital transformation without a well-planned strategy; it’s your roadmap or blueprint of what you want to achieve and how you want to do it. Since you are carrying out innovations, changing operations and business models, as well as leveraging emerging technologies, a digital transformation strategy serves as your guide.
The biggest mistake an organization can make is to look at digital transformation as simply discovering and adopting new technology to become more efficient. You must go at it holistically; it requires re-aligning your operating model with new business models.
A good strategy takes into consideration how to improve customer experience, especially now that most employees work remotely. When you produce new values for your customers and ensure your operational model is more efficient, costs will be reduced, and you ultimately increase profits.
It may not have been easy for organizations based on the sudden need for remote work, but a digital transformation strategy must focus on the nature of the challenge at hand, outline the procedure to tackle the challenge and clear-cut steps that must be followed to tackle the problem.
Conclusion
A digital transformation strategy is not a to-do list; it must be explicit on the organization’s core operations, it must focus on how employees must refocus on the new organizational culture and meet the demands of customers. What values your employees and customers will derive from the digital transformation must be clearly spelled out.
It’s a program that focuses on changing the organizational culture; and for remote work, the CEO may have to take drastic measures that will affect employees, such as outsourcing some critical operations.
