As food and shelter, connectivity has become one of the essentials for humans today. The need to be constantly connected is so established that it has made its way to every aspect of life; it affects how people function or how they get things done on a daily basis. With this, a connected world is taking shape, where everyone is connected to everyone, kids to parents, friends to friends and mutual friends, customers to businesses, customers to things, and the major one – things to things. With this scenario, businesses get an opportunity to be directly connect to customers through their products (things) and know them on a personal level. They also are keen to understand how their products communicate with other products that the customer is likely to use and what information they can gain from them to accelerate their business growth.

To make this digital enablement possible, powerful technologies such as cloud computing, big data, mobile broadband, internet of things, and machine learning are used to its fullest potential.

Digital enablement is about persuading the digital transformation journey of an enterprise through digital business platforms in order to achieve efficient business processes, engage workforce, deliver exceptional customer experience, and revive the enterprise business model.

While talking about digital enablement, the primary focus is on the following three areas:

Here, digital connectivity talks about converting analog business processes to digital and connecting data flows across various silos. While digital services can be described as consuming business services through digital channels to expand business relationships, digital experience is all about changing how businesses work and create new business models that are powered by digital platforms.

A Case in Point

Let’s take an example to understand what digital enablement in an organization looks like:

Steve is a sales executive for a company that is undergoing digital transformation. On a regular work day, Steve needs to connect with a few of his clients that are located in different parts of the world. The basic infrastructure requirement for Steve is to have remote access to his work data from any device at any given time even when he is on the go. Knowing his requirements, his organization’s IT department needs to take care of the following things:

• A centralized data storage that can make all the required information readily available to Steve from any part of the world using any device.
• Leverage a unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) solution that Steve can use to establish a connection with his clients regardless of his location or device.
• Allow mobile devices to access the system through a cloud connectivity that has a responsive file sharing system.
• Make use of data to determine how Steve’s job is likely to change in the upcoming months to update the technology required to support it.

Digital enablement is about shaping the digital transformation journey of a business by digitalizing their business platform and processes. Talking about digital transformation, it is more than just digitizing the current processes. It is more about getting to know the why, how, and when of business activities and focusing on how to improve them.

The digital transformation starts with your workforce, as they are the first ones to get introduced to the organization’s digital strategy and to understand how it will change the business processes.

However, your internal workforce is simply one level of digital enablement. To actually embrace digital era changes, your organization furthermore needs to use technology to empower your customers and to connect and communicate together with your business partners. According to MIT, there are 9 key components of self-made Digital Transformation:

1. Process Digitization
2. Customer Understanding
3. Top-Line Growth
4. Customer Touch Points
5. Worker Enablement
6. Performance Management
7. Digitally Modified Business
8. New Digital Business
9. Digital Globalization

All these 9 segments combine to form what we call digital transformation for a particular organization.

A step-by-step approach towards Digital Enablement

Step 1: Plan your digital transformation journey

• Prepare a clearly defined digital strategy
• Alignment of digital strategy with the organizational strategy
• Alignment of the resources and team with the digital strategy

Step 2: Appoint Leaders to drive digital transformation

• Check the leadership readiness for this change
• Discuss the required leadership attributes
• Create a platform to develop and enhance digital leadership capabilities
• Discuss new organization design in a way that it embraces digital culture

Step 3: Interact with the digital organization

• Migrate the entire workforce to the new digital organization
• Develop ‘digital-first’ capabilities through learning
• Plan employee performance metrics and guide on how to cope with the digital culture
• Discuss the benefits of a digital organization with employees and customers

Is your business ready for Digital Enablement?

If your organization still religiously follows outdated principles and concepts, your business might not survive the age of everything digital. To stay relevant, businesses need to work on how to respond faster to market trends and deliver better customer service, which is even more crucial than simply focusing on product quality and pricing. May it be customers or businesses, they only buy things when they actually feel the need, and the need for digital transformation is now.

eInfochips’ digital team can accompany you in a smooth transition through your digital transformation journey. Get in touch with us and help us understand your business, so we can design the right digital enablement strategy for your business.