How to Avoid These 3 Pitfalls of Digital Transformation

December 3, 2021 | Karen Astley | SS&C

The pressure to create efficiencies along with the pace of quickly evolving new technologies—including process automation and RPA to reduce human effort and artificial intelligence to guide processing and read documents—is driving digital transformation across industries.

There are, however, challenges to implementing a digital transformation. Budget overruns or negative-yielding ROIs can be very costly. But there are ways to help keep your project on track; three to be specific:

1. Get the right level of support to change. Digital transformation failures often stem from a lack of top-down support. While many see C-level budget approval as sufficient, senior management really needs to understand the reason for the change and how it affects them. When senior management communicates the benefits of transformation to the whole organization and supports the necessary change, it generates and maintains excitement for the life of the project.

2. Right skill and Up skill. Make sure you have the right people with the right skills working on your transformation. Many organizations assume the people doing the current task will be the best at driving transformation, but the right combination of upskilling existing resources who can work with technology specialists are better able to take feedback about and understand frustrations with current processes and apply the right technology to drive efficiency.

3. Start small. Finally, with an initiative as large as a digital transformation, it is easy to choose the wrong starting point. Mapping and modeling an organization’s entire operations may seem like it will guide decision-making, but that process can take so long to complete that the business likely will change by the time you finish. Success breeds success and starting with smaller processes can demonstrate a quick return and build momentum.

To learn more about avoiding the pitfalls of digital transformation projects, view our on-demand “How to Avoid Costly Digital Transformation Failures” webinar.