Strengthening Digitalization in Companies and Successfully Managing Change
Your digital maturity as a basis for further decisions:
Ensuring the future viability of companies in the digital age primarily means making the best possible use of the opportunities of digitalization for one's own company, identifying potentials, and successfully addressing digital challenges. For this, you need to know where you currently stand. Digital transformation is a management task that affects all areas of a company. It is not sufficient to modify individual products or digitize processes in a piecemeal manner. If you truly want to gain a productivity advantage or, for example, create digital customer experiences to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need transparency and a critical look at your current digital maturity level ("your status quo") in order to subsequently develop and implement a holistic digitalization strategy. The speed and success of your implementation depend on productivity factors and internal company conditions.
Your digitalization strategy:
Detail how you can or must address the "levers" of digitalization to successfully drive digital transformation forward. Consider that this is not primarily about a purely technical change, but mainly about creating socio-cultural and organizational framework conditions. The executives and employees of your company are equally challenged to engage with the changes of this transformative phase and shape the upcoming measures. Collaborative teams working innovatively and enthusiastically on an equal footing in agile corporate structures strengthen a future-oriented and open corporate culture and overall promote willingness to perform.
What objectives are you pursuing with your digitalization strategy? Do you aim to gain a productivity advantage through consistent automation of business processes and associated efficiency gains? Or is it about creating digital customer experiences with new smart services? Through the development of new business models, the value chain of your company can even undergo sustainable changes. Collaborations with suppliers or other business partners can also bring advantages and business approaches based on digital networking.
Furthermore, internal company goals must also be defined within the framework of your digitalization strategy: flexibilization of working time and location, new forms of internal and external collaboration, or improvement of communication and information exchange among employees.
"5 Stages to Digital Business":
To gain clarity regarding your objectives, looking at the "5 Stages to Digital Business" can be inspiring or helpful:
- System performance
- More transparency and better decisions
- Lean and fast processes
- Smart products and new services
- New business models
Which stage or level do you want to achieve with your business?
What are you already doing today to set the right course? Answers to these questions are at the same time your central basis for further implementation steps.
Work 4.0: Strengthening Collaboration and Innovation in the Company
The most important interface - even with increasing digitalization - in a company is and remains the human being. Companies must create the conditions for digital transformation in the company: the structures, processes, etc. must be adapted. Leadership in the digital age, for example, no longer works the same way as in the past. Employees also need to reorient themselves and find their way in this new working environment. Democratization, co-creation, and creativity are expected - a respectful, trusting, transparent collaboration at all levels is the basis for this. Each individual employee is given more responsibility. Moving away from instructions, hierarchies, and working by the book. Agile companies, whose employees think creatively and collaboratively shape, will be successful and master the challenges of digital change together. To establish collaborative and innovative working methods in a company, it can be useful and effective, for example, to establish fixed "future teams" or "innovation teams. These teams should be enabled to efficiently and purposefully discuss future topics and develop solutions together.
"Digital Roadmap":
Digitalization has many facets and challenging dynamics. Regularly and critically review your current implementation status. Digital transformation is not a time-limited project that will be completed in x months, but rather a permanent management task for the coming years and decades. Ideally, document your measures and action areas in a "Digital Roadmap."
