Organizations believe digital transformation is the way to undergo process transformation, introduce automation into the business, and ensure customer satisfaction. Even though the term is being extensively used, there are only a few who truly understand and implement it. Simply speaking, digital transformation encourages organizations to reconsider their approach towards everything- from teams to process to deliverables.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the current buzzword of the IT industry. It describes the process of utilizing technology to bring real change or modify an existing business process.

Digital transformation affects traditional roles like sales, customer service, and marketing by letting them automate the repetitive or complex process with applications and programs. Upcoming firms are implementing the core of digital transformation into their initial business plan, making sure they are future-ready from the start. All these companies have one thing in common- they want to ensure ultimate customer satisfaction.

Entertainment giant Netflix uses the digital transformation to customize the user experience through movie recommendations and personalized emails. The basics at play here are related to accessing insight into user behavior, habits, and preferences. Netflix understands the capability of the technology. It helps them make the most out of their technology investment and adapt the business accordingly.

As you can see, developing and introducing new software into your existing process is the key to digital transformation. Development teams have undergone a big shift by changing their modus operandi to DevOps. So, it is very believable that introducing best practices in your DevOps can pace up the process of digital transformation.

Tips to Enable Digital Transformation:

Automation is key:

If you want to align the operation and business aspect of your organization, automation is the key to that. The biggest roadblocks in the digital transformation journey between IT and Business can only be bridged with a definite process.

The DevOps team of today does not wait around for the entire team to finish a project, rather each piece of software developed is sent for testing and consecutive release as and when one engineer finishes their job. This can only be achieved through a CI/CD Pipeline implementation (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment).

It is not just a coincidence CI/CD is considered as the backbone of DevOps, integral to the building, testing, and deployment of an application. However, the biggest risk lies in identifying which processes can be automated- either through outsourcing or inside-development. Once you have hopped through this stage, it is easier to set up an entire process.

Proper communication that aligns plan with execution:

With a traditional IT structure being replaced with the robust DevOps mechanism, it is imperative to ensure communication does not slip through the crack. Digital transformation is all about communicating your effort and plans with stakeholders describing what goal needs to be achieved.

Spending some extra resources to align your internal team, sales team, and end customer can save you tons of time in explaining the plan later. Digital transformation is only achievable through interacting with teams across verticals and bringing them together for idea sharing and execution.

Reporting & Analytics wherever possible:

An improved business outcome is the only way to determine whether your digital transformation efforts are working or not. However, it surely sounds silly measuring the impact of your process only at the end of the stipulated period. That’s why it is imperial to introduce reporting and measurement analytics whenever possible.

Find out answers to crucial queries such as How long does it take for a release? How long does the execution take before customers start using it? Have operations cost come down? Thanks to smart APIs, CRMs, and other reporting tools, it can be easy.

Understand the power of people:

Bringing people to the table that gives them visibility, and explaining to them their goals can help them be more engaged and introduce innovative ideas. Explain to your people not only to see from a defect or release perceptive but also from the customers perspective.

Let them find out the answer to an important question- how will this update help the customer? Remember people are different, which means your approach needs to be different depending on the situation, ultimate goal, skill level, environmental factors, and the tools being used.

Make changes as and when required:

When you put customer experience as your ultimate organization goal, there can be changes with each customer input. A new request taking priority may hinder serious work being done on another. Sorting out tasks based on their importance and priority can strengthen deliverable execution without affecting the core functionalities of your team.

On another note, an idea that clicked in one situation may entirely flop in another. So, the focus should be on the end goal rather than on the path taken to reach there. You must be willing to adapt and learn through inputs before each new process, approach, or tool is taken up. Check yourself frequently to see your approach is resonating with the end goal.

Keeping up with digital transformation:

The trending practices associated with DevOps put development, execution, delivery, and customer satisfaction at the middle of any digital transformation. It is the only way to speed up innovation and garner customer trust on the way. Alignment of development, operations, IT, sales, and customer support teams through communication and adapting to each challenge is the key to implementing digital transformation in the real world.