I’m sure you’ll agree that no one expected the world to be the way it was just a few months ago. Who knows what else is to come in the coming days, months or years. So how do you ensure that you’re growing fast enough to stay ahead of the many unknown challenges to come? The solution is not trying to make massive, sweeping changes across your entire way of life. You need to find ONE way to keep yourselves focussed on your digital, customer and technology strategies.
It is time for bold scaling in the world of digital transformation. It’s time for preparing yourselves for the post-COVID era. We cannot predict the future, but we can ensure resilience and flexibility to adapt for a successful tomorrow. Digital adoption has accelerated IT and digital transformation across various sectors. We need to look at the recovery phase of the Covid-19 era with new ways of communicating and working. New behaviours have to be adopted to ensure that the changes in consumer preferences are understood. This will help you empathise with their feelings to create a seamless customer experience for them.
Suddenly, we see technology at the forefront of the new normal enabling additional digital channels, converting in-person meetings to remote meetings, managing additional bandwidth utilisation as examples of new norms of working. Technology is now being seen as not just an “enabler” but an essential “business driver” for digital transformation.
The new normal
While accurate predictions are not possible, it is natural to wonder what the new normal might look like and how a significant digital focus with a reliance on technology is vital to delivering end-user and client expectations. The IT function and the IT professionals have to be prepared to imbibe and adapt to the new normal. The strategy should mature the IT function to act as a business driver for digital transformation.
The focus should be on how to mature the IT department on the backdrop of effectiveness, efficiency, agility, and innovation to meet the business's needs to become a fully integrated partner. The goal is to drive change efficiency across the organization, optimise resources and measure, monitor, and enhance the end-user employee and customer satisfaction.
Impact of COVID-19 on the IT function, professionals and IT spend
There are two facts in the world of digital business transformation.
Digital Business transformation: Technology is changing very rapidly, and those changes seem to be accelerated from the impact of CovId-19
Behavioural transformation: Organisations absorb these changes at a much slower pace.
It takes time for people to alter their thinking, ways of working, and unlearning to adopt new behaviours. With groups of people, where there are existing structures, processes, incentives, and cultural momentum, it takes even more effort to turn the ship. The larger the group, the higher the institutional cultural change required.
While digital business transformation is the process of reinventing your business model it must be enabled by technology innovation to differentiate product/service offerings in the post-COVID-era, organisations should look to reset that gap between technological change and organisational change. While bringing a seamless transformation to the organisation in both aspects, we pay attention to six vital elements:
Organisational design
Organisational culture
People engagement
Ways of working
Management and leadership
Governance and funding
To have successful Digital Transformation you need IT excellence which invariably requires the IT Function to be transformed and aligned to the digital agenda/initiatives.
IT Transformation journey, maturity model and benefits
The current IT recovery state and findings show that prudent investments must be made in priority areas. Elimination of non-core spending is critical to avoiding budget shortfalls. Key business leaders must work with the IT leadership team to create a framework that transforms your IT infrastructure. They must synchronize to work on key technologies to generate value to the business and bring agility to IT services and ultimately add business value.
The IT Transformation journey in the post-COVID-era will be centred on consolidation, rationalization, optimization, and agility. IQS have developed a IT maturity model (ITMM) to aid that journey:
Transforming your IT team into adapting to the ‘new normal’ will require a proactive service delivery approach, supported by organisational change, to enhance end-user communication, productivity, and motivation through automated communication channels to see a world of difference.
IT Organisational change lessons learned
Business agility is critical in responding to internal and external changes triggers. This coupled with business resilience are key components for businesses to reinvent their business models and develop new capability to truly transform. This require the combination and collaboration of process, people and technology:
How IQS enables a smooth organisational change experience
Many years of experience has taught us that it's important not to do too much too quickly. Keeping the gradient of change and expectations manageable is key initially. Adding too much too quickly will inflate expectations and business outcomes will not be achieved. The path of unlearning is also harder if undue pressure is applied, whilst it is always easier to learn. Transformation programmes are known to fail when value is not delivered in incremental small bite size chunks of change coupled with an environment of learning, experimentation, safety from failure, lessons learnt and the growth of individuals and the delivery of business value.
From a people perspective it's always important to understand where individuals are on the S curve change journey:
Through this understanding effective change management techniques, interventions and tools can be applied supported by training, coaching, and mentoring for staff:
The articulation of a compelling vision can bring a lot of reactions at all levels of an organisation. Insecurity, depression, low confidence, and fear can prove to be a hurdle in the journey. It is up to leaders, supported by the business, to boost their morale to ensure that the vision is attainable such that incremental changes are highly visible and engaging for successful transformation.
IQS helps organisations to enhance employee and customer experience through Digital and IT Transformation. We can help you measure, monitor, and enhance your IT end-user and customer experience to deliver on your transformation objectives.
‘We Solve Digital and IT Transformation Problems You Think Can’t Be Solved’
https://www.innovativequalitysolutions.co.uk/
To know more about how we can bring complete IT transformation to enhance IT end-user and customer experience, watch our webinar or connect with us for a free consultation where we can explore your needs. We look forward to hearing from you.
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