By being careful about each small detail, CIOs can look at controlling costs without necessarily controlling or cutting down on digital transformation plans during the COVID-19 crisis.
While most companies have tried to embark on the journey of transforming themselves digitally over the last few years, the pandemic has been the biggest catalyst to raise a frenzy towards automation and migration to the cloud for securing processes.
The industry is anxious, with examples of digital transformation failures having increased costs with no actual ROI. The below points define the success of digitization:
Identify and transform journeys and not just processes
Most firms make the mistake of conducting immersion sessions with different departments and working on automating their individual processes. This will ensure that the job is done but will continue to remain suboptimal. Irrespective of how the organizations are managed, the processes seldom work in silos. To ensure a successful transformation, enterprises need to realize that all processes are interdependent and interlinked.
Top Three Ways to Streamline and Accelerate Digital Transformation
Take baby steps: POCs before deciding to roll out at full scale
All firms are unique, not necessarily in terms of the nature of the business but also in the way they have evolved and function. So, while there will be some basic learnings, often specialized digital solutions would be needed for each process. The best in class vendors on board need to execute transformation projects to roll it out at scale. It’s important to negotiate with the vendors for a PoC. So, firms need to try to keep the PoC free and as low cost as possible. Then roll it out to a small fraction of the customers or internal team, depending on who it is designed for is important.
Keeping an eye on overage
Enterprises often plan for a certain scale with well-thought yearly budgets accordingly. This might include getting APM licenses for a certain number of servers, or reserving servers on the cloud for a year and so on. However, it is quite impossible to predict all such ups and downs, especially periodic spikes throughout the year. Such spikes that last from a day to even a couple of months as enterprises end up utilizing more resources than what they plan for. So, it becomes immensely critical to keep an eye on the overage to dynamically work with and handle unexpected overages.
Security remains most vital
Security remains a massive topic on its own, being the most vital concern throughout. Especially in the COVID times, security incidences have dramatically increased. Any security breach can massively impact the business in 2 major ways – downtime and sensitive data leakage leading to brand damage.
Digital Transformation – Employees Observe Areas of Improvement in Their Organizations
Culture of frugality
Frugality has to be built into the company’s culture for optimizing every resource available, and there needs to be multiple second thoughts before investing in anything new. Often improvisation is the key answer rather than always investing in any new tool.
Finally, these are not the end-all of what one can do to control costs, especially in times of pandemic like we are witnessing today, but it is definitely a good starting point.
