No industry in the world is going to be spared the effects on digitization and only businesses that adapt quickly, innovate will survive. Some learn this lesson faster than others and gain a huge advantage in the market. So what does digitization look like?
The first critical factor of digitization is the reduction in paper usage and manual processes. Paper based processes are not only space consuming and tedious but also not environment friendly. Now in the 21st century that might be seen as a ‘duh’ statement but we are continually surprised by how many organizations today especially in India still use paper based systems. It might be another 10-20 years before we see paper disappear all together from enterprises.
As you eliminate paper based or manual processes and replace them with a mixture of devices from PCs to mobile hand held devices that run on cloud based systems, the organization becomes more efficient, leaner and greener. Not only do you save costs of stationary but also help reduce your business carbon footprint.
Another important part of digitization of your business is creating opportunities for customer self service. Identify processes which you do for the customer and tweak them to allow the customer to do it themselves directly without any intervention. The more you move peripheral processes to the self service model, the more you release your resources for the critical tasks part of your core solutions. In some cases you might get push back from customers who rely on you to spoon feed them everything but with the right incentives and communication you can win them over to the new way of doing things.
As you transition to digital processes your customers and prospects will start seeing you in a new light as a business that is modern, leverages technology and is prepared for future. The type of organization they want to do business with.
Eliminating paper and moving customers to self service definitely impact the efficiency but when you look at all your critical processes through the digitization lens you will see huge opportunities to bring in efficiencies either by leveraging technology or by simplifying the processes directly.
Organizations over the years tend to accumulate useless overhead on all processes either directly or indirectly as they do business. Some of these serve a purpose in terms of security or compliance but many of them are there simply because no one asked why.
Digitization of your processes allows you to look at everything with a critical eye and weed out the unnecessary overheads embedded in all processes and create a more efficient and leaner work flow for your organization.
This is usually a controversial point as it immediately brings visions of layoffs but in real experience we have seen that digitization does not really affect staff retention. It only happens where organizations are already bloated and that has nothing to do with digitization but with resource utilization.
Counter intuitively we have realized that digitization actually creates more job opportunities as it creates a lot of room for innovation and newer processes. Yes, job profiles do tend to change during digitization but it also creates a forward motion for people’s careers as their productivity increases, dog work reduces and they see themselves providing more value to the company through ideas and innovation.
As we help more of our customers’ transition to digital in their marketing or business processes we see them going through a painful transition but one that eventually leads to amazing success and growth and helps create a highly efficient and environment friendly organization.
