Businesses know they have to make the digital transformation in order to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace. The trouble is that “digital transformation” is such a broad term, and businesses seek to do it with such urgency that in a rush to get a slice of the pie they don’t pay enough attention to the ingredients.
The answer is to use business intelligence to inform your digital transformation and ensure that you’re investing your time and resources where they can make the most impact.
Business intelligence tools are themselves part and parcel of digital transformation, and, as we’ll explore, a great way to ease your team members into what can be perceived as an overwhelming change in how you conduct business.
What Is Digital Transformation
The most obvious aspect of digital transformation is the integration of tools and technologies across all departments. Though aims for digital transformation vary from business to business, one overarching aim is to create efficiency in your workflows and maximise value for your customers.
So, you need to invest in tools and technologies. But there is another investment required in order to make your digital transformation effective.
You also need to invest in changing the culture within your company. Digital transformation requires all departments to adopt (or should we say embrace) the idea of new technologies, to feel comfortable with experimentation and get used to taking risks.
This second part is often more challenging than sourcing the digital technologies themselves. It’s asking people who are comfortable with existing operations and established in their positions to step outside of their comfort zones. But digital transformation is a necessary leap of faith to keep your business relevant and competitive.
The Role of Business Intelligence in Digital Transformation
As we’ve established, digital transformation requires investment not only in terms of the tools and technologies, but also in terms of getting your team members across all departments on board with using said technologies.
In order to make the transformation as smooth as possible, you need to ensure that the tools you adopt will irrefutably help and enhance your teams in their work, and that they’ll be able to see the results.
Adopting comprehensive business intelligence software is a wise first step in your digital transformation. It will help you:
- Extract useful data
- Identify where your investment will make the most impact
- Track your KPIs so that you can change and refine your strategy accordingly and advance towards your business goals.
Whether you’re just starting your digital transformation, or you’re looking for ways to accelerate adoption of new technologies within your organisation, it’s advisable to have a clear system in place to measure and analyse new initiatives to help your teams make responsive decisions and take necessary action.
In this new digital economy, you need to be able to take risks to advance your business and keep it relative, but you also need to be able to notice and react in a timely way when things don’t pan out as you’d hoped. The result? Informed decision-making, increased efficiency and better performance.
Business intelligence can also help you mitigate risk by enabling you to articulate your priorities and focus your investment where it is needed most.
Another advantage is that data doesn’t lie. Using business intelligence can help your employees address issues from a neutral perspective. Data-driven insights highlight where things are going well and expose your business’s biggest challenges objectively.
In a study interviewing over 330 public companies about their management and technology policies, one digital business center worked with McKinsey to discover that companies which used a data-driven decision-making approach were on average 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors.
A Great Introduction To Digital
The term “digital transformation” is understandably daunting. It sounds like a drastic change that will revolutionise every aspect of how business is conducted within your organisation. However, it needn’t be so intimidating. As Nathan Furr, Jur Gaarlandt, and Andrew Shipilov write in their Harvard Business Review article “Don’t Put a Digital Expert in Charge of Your Digital Transformation”,
Digital transformation is often less about a radical rethinking of the business than about learning how to use digital tools to better serve customers.”
Framed in this way, digital transformation is much more accessible. Take this simple approach, and make small but steady steps to get your team members on board and foster a positive attitude towards digital.
Business intelligence is great stepping stone into digital transformation for several reasons:
- Business intelligence is useful across all departments from HR, IT, Sales, Marketing and Product Development, so to start you just need to train your teams with one tool.
- As a result of its universality, it invites interdepartmental collaboration and sharing of data. Teams can also help each other adopt the same tool in different ways.
- It gets teams used to reading and interpreting data which will be vital no matter which tools you use later on in your digital transformation.
- There are plenty of intuitive, easy-to-use tools on the market, since they are meant to be used by different industries and across different departments, no one will be blindsided by jargon or deeply technical language.
Get started with the Symanto Insights Platform
If you’re looking for a business intelligence tool to step your business into digital transformation, the Symanto Insights Platform is an intuitive and comprehensive tool that captures useful insights from easy-to-source big data online.
Find out more, get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration today to discover how your business can benefit.
