The Top 4 Ways Digital Transformation is Beneficial for Business Growth
Digital transformation is impacting almost every industry in India, including logistics, retail, manufacturing, real estate, health care, and finance. According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) India Digital Adoption Survey, 70% of Indian businesses will be making maximum investments in digital technologies by 2025. However, a lot of businesses are not equipped to embrace digital transformation because of a lack of efficient leadership. Thus, hiring people with digital transformation skills will be the topmost priority for enterprises in the future. Let’s understand how digital transformation is beneficial for business growth.
This blog covers the following points:
- What is Digital Transformation?
- What Does Digital Transformation Mean for Businesses?
- How Does Digital Transformation Impact Market Competitiveness?
- What are the Key Benefits of Embracing Digital Transformation?
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of integrating disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and cloud computing to make data-driven and intelligent business decisions.
It refers to embracing digital technologies to enhance business processes and customer experiences and gain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving business environment.
To elaborate further, digital transformation includes:
- Process optimization using the latest technologies
- Integrating digital business models
- Continuously adapting to a constantly changing business environment to improve customer experience
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What Does Digital Transformation Mean for Businesses?
Digital transformation comprises three stages—digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. It is, in fact, a multidisciplinary field. On the management front, digital transformation is referred to as integrating digital business models, such as using digital tools for marketing. However, for tech teams, digital transformation is the process of utilizing disruptive technologies to make data-driven decisions.
Thus, digital transformation is a holistic development of business processes that helps achieve specific objectives. Let us look at how its three phases will impact businesses as per the latest digital transformation trends:
1. Digitization
In this stage, businesses store all physical data in a digital format and make a switch from analog tasks to digital tasks.
2. Digitalization
Next up, we have digitalization, where businesses witness a material shift in their daily activities. In essence, it refers to the process of integrating the latest technologies to optimize existing business processes and strategies. Furthermore, it includes creating digital channels for the free flow of communication and using digital tools for better collaboration between team members.
3. Digital Transformation
This last stage is the most critical for businesses—and also the most challenging. During digital transformation, many companies struggle to receive leadership support and are unable to create an efficient change management framework. Digital transformation is focused on developing digital business models that enhance customer experience and help them gain a competitive edge. Ultimately, it helps increase revenue.
To sum up, businesses experience the following changes through the course of their digital transformation journey:
- They will have to adopt a customer-centric or customer-first approach
- Products and services offered by businesses should align with the latest digital business models and strategies
- Digital and technical leadership will become extremely crucial to drive digital strategies and foster a culture of innovation
- Last but not least, the senior management will have to lead the digital transformation and support employees and customers
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How Does Digital Transformation Impact Market Competitiveness?
Given the significant shift in consumer behavior and preferences brought about by this phenomenon, it has become imperative for businesses to harness the potential of digital transformation opportunities. Here is how digital transformation is helping businesses gain a competitive advantage:
1. Facilitating Innovation
It facilitates innovation through modern technologies. Businesses, in turn, can use technologies like AI and computing to analyze market trends, consumers’ needs, preferences, and changing demands.
2. Enabling Automation
It benefits a business by automating tedious and complex processes. Therefore, it reduces cost, increases efficiency, and mitigates the risk of manual errors.
3. Helps Increase Focus on Core Business Activities
Businesses can utilize the cost and time saved by using digital tools to focus on core business activities and think of unique business solutions or ideas, thus giving them a competitive edge.
Nevertheless, it is also proving to be detrimental to businesses. While it facilitates innovation and creativity, businesses face digital transformation challenges, especially in a hyper-competitive business environment, making it difficult for them to grow.
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What are the Key Benefits of Embracing Digital Transformation?
Here are some digital transformation benefits for businesses:
1. Enhances Customer Engagement
One can witness the digital transformation impact of businesses by viewing their customer engagement process. Digital transformation makes it easier for businesses to collect and analyze customer-related data, which enables them to understand customer behavior, trends, and demands. This helps them offer a more personalized customer experience.
2. Data-Driven Business Decisions
By integrating digital technologies, businesses can capture real-time business data and analyze it to make effective business decisions.
3. Helps Boost Revenue
Digital transformation is also beneficial in cost reduction. It automates processes and reduces machine downtimes and the expenses required to hire human resources. Moreover, digital transformation also increases productivity and efficiency, helping businesses deliver cost-effective products and services.
4. Sustainable Business Solutions
Businesses are experiencing a profound digital transformation impact. From manufacturing, supply chain logistics, and vendor management to sales and marketing, digital transformation is changing the majority of business processes and functions. In addition to this, it is also enabling them to build more robust processes and strategies and sustainable business solutions by using automated technologies.
Knowledge of digital transformation trends and digital transformation impact is essential not only for businesses but also for working professionals. According to a recent study by Amazon Web Services, 93% of Indian employers are searching for candidates with digital skills. The research also says that 91% of professionals with advanced digital skills experience a higher level of job satisfaction in comparison to professionals with basic digital skills.
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There is a clear shortage of skilled digital talent in the Indian workforce. Hence, now seems to be an ideal time to learn how to tackle digital transformation challenges—and you can do that by pursuing a digital transformation course that teaches you all the latest digital transformation benefits and digital transformation opportunities. Explore Emeritus’ online digital transformation courses and experience exponential growth in your career today.
By Sneha Chugh
Write to us at content@emeritus.org
