What is digital transformation consulting?

Digital transformation consulting focuses on the integration of business processes with digital technology across all areas of a company. Implementation of recommended best practices can profoundly change how a business operates and delivers value to its customers – both internal and external.  

Companies often engage with a digital transformation consultant because digital transformation usually involves cultural change in addition to process and technology changes and can be met with resistance if not implemented properly.

Digital transformation consulting can also mean different things to different people. 

For organizations just beginning their journey, it’s about helping organizations with their migration to the cloud (public, private, or hybrid), implementing digital workflows and culturally adjusting to wholesale change. 

For enterprises already there, it could mean deploying new products and services faster, further improving the customer experience, or lowering the risk of exposure to security breaches and cyberattacks.

Digital transformation consulting therefore addresses more than technology; it is about blending people with new solutions. The resulting changes must be embraced by users so that the enterprise realizes a return on its investment. The human element must be considered. Because what good is digital transformation if customers and employees feel like they are being force-fed technology and do not adopt the solution?

Why engage a digital transformation consultant?

You don't know what you don't know. It’s really as simple as that. 

If a business is undergoing a digital transformation, chances are that it is a successful, thriving enterprise and got that way because ownership/management focused on its core competency to build that better “mousetrap,” not necessarily a streamlined digital process.

True digital transformation involves fundamental change to organizational priorities including technology, network architecture, applications, processes, and how your people work.

Making these decisions involves data, workflow, and workload analysis on a scale stakeholders may not have attempted before. A certain expertise is needed to understand how skipping a seemingly insignificant detail can have a dramatic impact on the speed and success of the intended change. That same expertise can help to conceptualize a better solution and bring an entire organization – from C-level to hourly employee – to understand the importance of the planned change.  

Digital transformation consultants provide the external expertise and objectivity necessary to balance internal stakeholder perspectives (and knowledge gaps) with the project realities of budgets, overcoming deployment and implementation obstacles, and fostering adoption by end users.

Drivers of a successful digital transformation

Digital transformation consulting services are only effective when they intersect with people, processes, and technology. Keep these factors in mind to improve your chances for a successful outcome: 

Change management

Basically, have a plan. Change, whether expected or forced upon us, is often uncomfortable. Change management refers to the approaches, tools, and processes that a business uses to prepare, support, and direct its people to achieve the goals of a pending organizational change in a way that accommodates both the business and its people.

One vital key to successful change management is communication. Craft a clear strategy and make sure everyone is fully informed. Provide plenty of advance notice, the reason and timing for the change, training on new processes, and a mechanism for feedback to minimize disruption and employee resistance.

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Implement scalable technology

If all goes well, a digital transformation should drive growth. Leverage scalable cloud-based technologies to create a modular, flexible environment with the capacity to grow with the enterprise and meet fluctuating demand for computing and data storage assets.

Employ data analytics

Uncover insights and make better decisions faster through data analysis. Business intelligence tools and analytics services can help aggregate the right data points for optimal planning and forecasting.

Defined security practices

Every online environment needs to be protected against all manner of cyberattacks. Mobile devices and remote workers have greatly expanded the threat horizon of most enterprises.

Your digital transformation should include full multi-layered cybersecurity best practices featuring comprehensive endpoint protection, robust identity management, and 24x7 threat detection to ward off ransomware attempts and data breaches.

The solution should be able to quantifiably track the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue growth, profit margin, and return on investment to gauge decision-making and asset utilization goals against actual results.

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Our approach to digital transformation

We help organizations adapt and succeed through workflow optimization for increased business process agility, organizational change management, and measuring outcomes through customized analytics.Our approach to digital transformation consulting features six core areas of expertise to help your business reach its goals faster:

1. Innovate and strategize. Align your team’s digital strategy with program governance to ensure objectives are met.

2. Scale business operations. Focus on key operational elements for resilient, transformative, and sustainable performance during even the most turbulent conditions.

3. Optimize processes and core technologies. Streamline your digital strategy by finding and mitigating productivity drains and bottlenecks in technology you already own, maximizing your investment in existing assets.

4. Enhance customer experience. Gain insight into your customers’ values, their pain points, and create solutions that deliver a better experience for your customers and you.

5. Transform the organization. Our experts and change consultants help you develop transformational leadership strategies, guide change management, support customer adoption, and manage through any disruptions to ensure success.

6. Optimize decisions with data. Bring structured and unstructured data together into a single view, identifying trends and opportunities to develop a strategic roadmap for process improvement, and measuring the impact of change to ensure continuous enhancement.

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Digital Transformation as a Service (DTaaS): the future of digital transformation

Every customer engagement looks different because every organization is different.

In the past, that meant digital transformation often posed major technical and financial challenges, as there was never a one-size-fits-all solution. Every application had to be customized to map to unique workflows, and the hardware and servers had to be installed and maintained.

Today, however, many organizations, especially smaller ones, are turning to digital transformation-as-a-service (DTaaS) to achieve their business goals.

DTaaS provides the necessary tools, technologies, and expertise as a remote service through a provider instead of as an owned, on-premises solution.

This subscription-based approach lowers the cost barriers to entry, which helps organizations that previously thought digital transformation was beyond their reach to access advanced, scalable technologies through a services model.

You can engage with full DTaaS consulting services or take advantage of business services via an as-a-Service model. For example, the Intelligent Business Platform℠ gives a company access to enterprise applications and services, without needing the traditional enterprise infrastructure, manpower, or capital resources.