Many businesses struggle with making the transition into this new digital era, especially because of this daunting overhaul of your existing business

Business success today is dependent on the use of technology and it’s time to move your business into the digital era.

The way you promote and market your businesses is changing rapidly, and no matter how big or small your business is the need to change can no longer be ignored. Many businesses struggle with making the transition into this new digital era, especially because of this daunting overhaul of your existing business.

Companies or businesses are like people and as we grow up, our own experiences shape the wiring inside our brains and our neurons form as we grow into adulthood. That gives us our skills, intuition, ability to seize opportunities, examine things, but it also blinds us to a lot of things around us. If your company grew up in a completely different era, that's how you grew it, how you established your distribution chains, how you built your brand, how you learned who your customers were and learned how to make money.

You are now entering in a completely different environment.

The hardest part is to identify those assumptions in your strategic thinking. You will have to learn to adapt and evolve your business in a way that will help you to continue and to grow it in this digital age and economy that is transformed by successive waves of digital technologies. This challenge is fundamentally different during this “digital transformation” as to start a new business. Remember: you have a business that's already in existence and you need to transform it! You need to figure out how to move into digital future.

It’s not about what technology you're using, or how you deploy it, or any of those sorts of aspects. The hard part is about strategy, leadership, and new ways of thinking. 

You must rethink the following:

- customers

- competition

- data

- innovation and

- value

“Try to figure out the value of your business to the digital marketplace”

Business success today is very dependent on the use of technology. This switch to digitalization does not need to be a painful one and we want to give you a few tips to help you finally get started.

Firstly:
You need a business strategy for the digital era. Look at how digitalization will impact your industry and how it can fit with your ambitions. Take the time to assess just exactly how advanced you want to be in terms of digitalization. You will need to articulate a business strategy that stipulates digital goals with overall business goals. Are you looking to lead the industry in digitalization? Do you need to recover lost ground with competitors? CIOs will need to align IT departments with this business strategy. Collaboration is a huge key for making a successful move into the digital era. By creating a more collaborative business strategy, you can create an environment that fosters innovation and use that to shape the agenda to finally build a digital ecosystem within your business. This new business strategy can centre either on increasing revenue, realizing efficiencies, or even reimagining the entire industry or business.

Secondly:
You need to identify the areas of your business that will most benefit from digitalization and how to do it. your business will benefit most from focusing on these three priorities: moving to the cloud, using big data and analytics, and digitalizing customer experience. By determining your digital focus areas, you can identify the specific tools and platforms your business will need to transform your business. Such tools might include 3D printing or drones, or other process automation tools to speed up manufacturing processes or if you are already in the big data sector, platforms like converged storage or hybrid cloud storage could become new areas of focus.

Thirdly:
It is wise to make digitalization a business-wide move. The IT department or marketing departments should not be the only ones collaborating. For example, committees can be created like one that comprises both tech and business unit representatives to that will decide on important digital initiatives. Departments will need to set aside their own self-interest and focus on the new digital strategy that will be implemented. You can incentivize employees to aid in this by measuring an individual’s willingness and ability to collaborate.

Finally, you need to develop digital skills and build partnerships to help supplement your strengths. Here you will need to decide whether you will train people internally to strengthen the business’s digital skill level, or if you will partner with another business to do the training, or if you will acquire a tech business to merge into yours and take over certain areas such as data analytics, digital enterprise, or cybersecurity.

Remember: Moving your business into the digital era can create a multitude of benefits:

- increased efficiency

- increased revenues,

- stronger customer orientation and

- improved business operations.

By making the move, it will help you to grow your business by adding specific digital services and products to your portfolio, or by selling existing services and products through digital channels. Digitalization has also helped business to answer the demand of a more personal and customized approach to the shopping experience from customers.

If you can understand how the strategy rule book for business has changed and that you're now playing by rules you don't even realize you’ve learned. You've absorbed them and it is now shaping every business decision you make. If you can learn to step back, and relearn some of that thinking, your business can start to identify opportunities for growth and new value creation that are going to move it beyond what you ‘ve done in the past and lead you into the next stage of digital growth.