With the world in a cost-of-living crisis, companies must look to the more sustainable and efficient digital evolution, in favour of digital transformation.
In the post-pandemic world of work, organisations everywhere must leave a digital transformation mindset in the past and move toward a digital evolution future.
Digital evolution is the continued adoption and refinement of new and emerging technologies to improve business efficiency, reduce costs, overtake competitors, and achieve better outcomes. This approach can help businesses reach their target market more quickly and effectively, build a solid customer base, become more efficient, and diversify or expand.
Why digital evolution?
The big investment, big reward ethos of digital transformation is high risk – especially when it goes wrong. Harvard Business Review reports that of the annual $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformation pre-pandemic, an estimated $900 billion was wasted. That’s because many of the companies behind these figures failed to adopt robust, long-term strategies to support their tech development.
Had they considered combining analytics and customer insights, they could have been more structured, nuanced — and personal. The result would likely have been increased revenue, improved margins, and delivered an optimised back end of the website — freeing up time for further innovation.
It is also generally more cost-effective to drive efficiency by developing a programme to evolve what you already have, rather than scrapping it and starting again. This approach is a better use of employee time and capacity, with the added benefit that your people are free to focus on the next phase of innovation (as in the case above). This is especially important in a cost-of-living crisis when budget-holders are ‘‘sweating assets’’.
At Vidatec we support our clients to make regular, incremental improvements that enhance the employee experience and make a positive difference for customers. With the current rate of change – where new technologies and services are developed and released at lightning speed, providing better information, increasing automation, and pushing boundaries further – I would argue that if you’re not evolving, you’re risking business success.
Embracing digital evolution
Embracing digital evolution requires a new longer-term way of thinking. That’s because it’s a more gradual process, which requires sustained investment and allows people sufficient time to iterate and improve the familiar before moving to the next phase of innovation. It’s also more sympathetic to customers, affording them the time to transition with you while remaining familiar with and loyal to your brand and products.
With all this in mind, here are a few important shifts you’ll need to ensure digital evolution success within your business.
Shift 1: Business alignment
Digital evolution requires full business alignment. So, bring together your key stakeholders and outline the rationale – digital evolution will ensure your business can evolve at a steady and sustainable pace in service of your customers and with a people-centred approach.
As a collective, agree on what your ideal future state looks like and what you need to get there. In moving toward a coherent and unified approach, you inevitably move from digital transformation to digital evolution.
Shift 2: Objective setting
Next, invest time in developing your digital roadmap. Set clear objectives, understand roles and responsibilities, set measurable KPIs, and outline your review process. This will help everyone understand what they’re accountable for, and how they’ll be measured. It will also ensure everyone can remain focused and progress can be tracked.
Remember that digital evolution isn’t a rigid process — so ensure there’s room to flex as and when needed.
Shift 3: Map your digital estate
Once you’ve created your roadmap, map your digital estate. This should include details of the platform and technology stack in use and its key features.
This process will ensure you identify patterns of overlap between your existing platform capabilities/features, understand customer or audience touchpoints across the digital products and services you provide, and uncover ways that platforms and data can come together to deliver new products, services and experiences for your customers and end-users.
The use of analytics and customer surveys can also play a key role in analysing the effectiveness of your existing technologies.
Shift 4: Take your people with you
Every employee has the potential to be a brand ambassador and enabler of success. They might also have a unique insight into how to solve some of your primary pain points. So, make sure you take your people with you — the entire company, not just your tech department, must be engaged and invested in digital evolution.
As part of this process, consider the ‘‘change mindset’’ of your organisation – are they open or resistant to digital evolution? What do they believe about the complexity or scale of the change? What skillsets do they have and which ones will they need? Are additional resources needed, and will you need to recruit, or can you lean on external partners?
Underpin your change plan with appropriate, ongoing training and development opportunities. Ensure also that you have effective communication channels so there is a constant flow of relevant and useful information. With increased awareness, skills training and development, your people will embrace and enable a new digital evolution reality.
Customers are another important group. They choose to use your product or service and can provide brilliant insights about what they love (and don’t love) about your digital offerings. Elsewhere, partners, external consultants and industry experts could have different – and very revealing – perspectives that could revolutionise the way you think about your digital offerings.
Shift 5: Financial mindset
Last, but by no means least, ensure you have the right financial mindset for digital evolution and understand how it is different from the financial mindset required for digital transformation.
Transformation requires significant upfront investment — but the danger here is that money is spent quickly and easily, because of the hunger to deliver big, and fast. Invariably, these projects tend to ‘‘blow out’’ and end up being scrapped. Meanwhile, digital evolution requires regular, sustained investment over a long-term period to achieve meaningful improvement.
A good approach is to ensure a clear and concise business case against each item on your roadmap. What will be the result of the feature or capability? What market, customer or stakeholder benefits will it unlock? How long will it take to realise this benefit? These questions will support your prioritisation, ensuring focused spending where it delivers the most benefit.
With digital evolution comes a new long-term way of thinking — very different from the ‘‘go big or go home’’ digital transformation mindset. But it is essential for ensuring that businesses can advance at a steady and sustainable pace in service of their customers, in line with the latest developments and with a people-centred approach.
So, consider evolution — not revolution — and these important skills shifts for your business. In so doing, you will achieve incremental, continuous improvement across your digital offerings and propel your business forward in the new world of work.
About the Author
Greig Johnston is the CEO at Vidatec and a former CTO. He has worked in the technology sector for over 25 years, buying and selling technology services. He specialises in helping businesses of all sizes develop digital strategies that help technology leaders across many sectors mitigate risk, reduce cost and increase revenues.
