What is Digital Consulting?
Digital consulting helps organizations grow in the digital age. With digital consulting, organizations transform themselves and have new capabilities.
In this digital age, organizations feel the pressure of change. It is hard to see where the next competitor comes. To be successful in this hyper-competitive environment, organizations must be awake. There is no place to defend your organization.
1. The Process for Digital Consulting
Digital consulting transforms your organization. This transformation makes the organization more strong, more agile, and more profitable.
This transformation has different pieces. First, the organization decides the outputs and goals. In this step, the management comes together with their teams. Using the bottom-to-up and top-to-bottom approaches, the organization finalizes the outputs and goals.
The second step is to decide the criteria for the digital consultant. The organization determines the criteria list. This step dictates the success of a successful digital transformation.
In the third step, digital consultants execute the process with the organization.
In the last step, digital consultants deliver the project to the organization. The digital consultants and the organization agree on possible future projects.
Let’s dive into all these steps.
2. Decide your goals to achieve with Digital Consulting
Digital consulting and transformation projects end with these 6 outcomes:
- Harness the Power of Data Analytics
- Modernize Core Technology
- Optimize Your Operations
- Speed Up Marketing & Sales
- Create Stunning Digital Experiences
- Build a Digital Culture
Harness the Power of Data Analytics
Data is a new kind of power. There are different resources to collect data. Thanks to the Internet of things, your organization has more data than ever. With data transformation and delivery your organization combines all data in 1 place.
With robotics & automation, digital consultants use the data to create meaningful outputs. In this process, digital consultants use data analytics. Also, artificial intelligence is part of the decision-making.
Using data in the decision-making process does not guarantee success. But it helps to decrease the number of mistakes.
This becomes the foundation of your organization’s digital strategy.
Modernize Core Technology
The core technology is now part of your core strength. Technology transformation, infrastructure & cloud, cybersecurity, agile delivery, and technology sourcing are the sub-steps.
Optimize Your Operations
With your digital transformation process, operations start to become more efficient.
Your organization’s corporate functions turn into digitized operations. Digital transformation reshapes the resource plans.
With the right application of a digital transformation project, your organization runs Lean.
Speed Up Marketing & Sales
The digital transformation immediately improves marketing and sales operations. Data analytics brings digital sales opportunities.
The full implementation automates pricing. Dynamic e-commerce pricing and personalization at scale are some small examples.
Create Stunning Digital Experiences
Your organization shares all the data across the teams. You make the decisions based on data.
Your artificial intelligence understands customers and your organization’s capabilities.
These improvements help you to redesign the end-to-end customer journey. With the digital transformation, your organization has full control of the customer journey.
This power opens a new door: Experience Design. For each step of the customer journey, your organization can design different experiences.
The design experiences are one of the key outputs of digital transformation projects.
Build a Digital Culture
Digital transformation also transforms organizational culture. The new organizational culture shapes the organizational capabilities. With the same, most of the time fewer resources, your organization is now capable of doing more.
The full-scale transformation has another important output: enterprise-level agility. This helps organizations to launch new products & services in days; instead of months.
3. Criteria to choose Digital Consultant
Your organization decided on the goals. Now it is time to choose the right digital consultant.
The finished projects and referrals give you a big clue about the digital consultants. Also, keep in mind that digital consultants are teams of experts. They include different types of developers, project managers, and industry experts.
These 4 important criteria will help you to choose the right team:
- Quality Orientation: Does the team put quality in the first place?
- Development Approach: How does the team communicate, plan, and execute the process?
- Team size & structure: Are there enough team members? Is the team agile?
- Tech Knowledge & Stack: Is the team comfortable with different technological environments?
These questions separate the right digital transformation teams from the rest.
4. Process & Execution
Once you have the digital consultant, you start your digital transformation project.
These 6 steps help you to execute the process:
- Communication: Decide the communication channels. Add everyone who is in the project.
- Planning: Ask your development team which platform they use for planning. Be careful here. Most of the teams spend too much time here!
- Execution: Decide how often you will have vision meetings and update meetings. Stick to the meeting schedule.
- Transparency: Be open. Put everything on one platform. This will bring accountability.
- Delivery: Decide the iterations and sprints. How often will you get results?
- Retrospective: Ask your digital consultant to look back at the work together. Suggest changes, improve the process and aim for a perfect partnership.
5. Future Implementations
The digital transformation projects take at least 1 year. With the implementation of the project, your organization starts to get results. You will get immediate positive outcomes in operations, sales, marketing, and finance.
Your organization and shareholders adopt your new approach to doing business. This will have 2 results:
- Your current customers and partners will use your products & services more and more.
- Your organization will see more opportunities on the market.
With every new opportunity, your organization will develop. Your organization will have new needs. Your team will bring up new ideas. These changes are keys to the future implementation of your digital transformation. Changing technology and the market will show you the direction.
Your digital strategy takes advantage of changes. The future implementations are part of your digital transformation process.
Conclusion
The competition increases every day. The dynamics of the economy aren’t the same as before. Every organization is aware of this. But few of them get into action.
Starting your digital transformation will not only boost your revenue and profit. It will also help your company to get over this economic environment.
Taking your company to the next level is not an easy task. We all know it. With the right digital transformation team, the process will be smoother. You will get the results for your company. And your company will join the winners of this data-driven tech world.
