“Digital adoption is clearly the way of the future. Adapting to new technology and fully leveraging its features is imperative to the modern organization, and it is what leads to digital transformation.” – Lilach Bullock
The world is ruled by technology today, and digital transformation in businesses no longer remains a non-mandatory option. Organizations following the traditional way of working are having a tough time keeping abreast with the market competition. Those who have embraced digital transformation are progressing well in terms of revenue, productivity, and business success. The year shows an increasing trend of digital transformation across all business segments around the globe.
Between 2020 and 2023, direct investments into digital transformation are projected to reach a total of 6.8 trillion U.S. dollars. For 2023 alone, the spending on the technologies and services that enable digital transformation worldwide is expected to amount to 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars. – Statista
Another crucial element when it comes to digitizing your organization is selecting a trustworthy and capable digital transformation consultant. Many companies have faltered in their digitization drive because of a wrong choice of partner, someone who can completely help integrate and implement the best of digital competencies in the existing organizational setup. Hence, what’s most significant is selecting the best digital transformation consultant depending upon circumstances.
Why Is Selection of a Perfect Digital Transformation Consultant Important?
Choosing a perfect digital transformation consultant is of high significance because of the following reasons. A digital transformation partner –
- Reduces the risk of failure to a large extent
- Plays an important role in convincing and training employees
- Offers knowledge and experience to organizations
- Connects business strategies and digital technologies
- Enhances the knowledge base of companies on a technical level
- Assists organizations in meeting business goals
- Helps maintain budget estimates and project timelines
Key Tips for Choosing an Ideal Digital Transformation Partner for Your Business
Prepare a Checklist and Verify Its Affirmation at the Earliest
While you look for a perfect IT partner, it is vital to verify certain parameters right from the start, and an affirmative answer to each one of them ensures you are on the right path. Here are some of the important parameters that need a YES to move ahead and choose the partner:
- Has the partner understood and analyzed your organizational business objectives?
- Are they competent to define a robust digital transformation approach and implementation plan for your organization?
- Are they capable of implementing and choosing cutting-edge technologies that are popular in today’s tech world?
- Do they have well-defined communication strategies that can help ease collaboration with each other?
- Is there relevant industry experience that they possess to ensure a complete understanding of the business system?
- Is the partner well focussed on helping out the extra mile for getting a successful implementation?
- Do you feel they also share the same business values as the organization?
- Are they equipped with well-defined organizational policies, communication techniques, experienced projects, and skilled taskforce?
Work Out Your Digital Strategy and Road Map First
Even before you choose who will help you fulfill your digital transformation dreams, it is important to decide what strategy you would follow as an organization. There must be an honest survey of the firm’s level of digital awareness, the current technological setup, and how best can digitization help the daily business working. It must be thought of how you would implement the digital drive for yourselves and your clients alike.
The base criteria that are essential while implementing the digital drive must be chalked out in terms of deadlines, budget, the scope of work, training, implementation schedules, productivity effect, team awareness, and compatibility with business workflow. There must be an asynchronous collaboration between the two teams to work upon the roadmap that needs to be walked upon to garner the fulfillment of digital transformation objectives.
Check on the Expertise Levels, Technical Competencies and Range of Experience
There is a requirement for a correct fusion of skills and experience to deal with organizational IT structures. The varied roles and responsibilities that your digital partner will perform shall be varied and help you drive your organizational initiative to a successful outcome. Make sure they have the right mix of technical skills and managerial skills to run a successful project.
They must be using the most modern methods in their projects, keeping in mind the client’s objectives and projects in mind. Be it through prototypes, working models, or any other way, implementation and testing schedules must be worked upon, keeping in mind customer objectives.
Even observing their success stories matters a lot. The major implementation successes that the service provider has brought in a big deal of confidence in choosing them as our partner. Observing their case studies, prototypes, demonstrations, etc., can surely help instill our faith and confidence in them.
Start Looking for Ideal Partners in Your Network
Some organizations attempt to search for digital partners through search engines, but that exposes you to a huge list of service providers without any authenticated response. Instead, it is better to talk around with your references and get a fresh review of existing IT service providers.
This can be done by either talking over verbally or write on social media handles about your requirement and what you are looking for. After you get good feedback, you must check the reviews and competencies by making the most of the network.
Pace, Flexibility, and Ability to Stay Agile Must Be Checked
In the fast-moving world of technology, it is imperative to ensure that the consultant possesses a great deal of flexibility to adapt to different technologies, regular updates, and seamless integrations with third-party systems. Even agility of teams must be checked upon well in advance.
Even the pace at which the organization matches its growth with the consultant’s steps is important. The market demands of the organization may keep changing often. The consultant must be agile enough to keep up with the speed of variations in the market and ensure a seamless run of the digital activities without any hindrance. A faster time-to-market is a must through proper planning and implementation processes.
Different parameters like the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, customized interfaces, technical line-up with other technical systems, maintenance standards, compliance with rules and regulation standards like GDPR, mobile readiness must be studied and analyzed. If the consultant can handle these situations with ease, it implies it surely possesses rich experience and expertise.
Analyze the Organizational Footprint and Project Execution Methodologies
Apart from technical experience and expertise, it is important to understand how the IT partner performs its project execution methodologies. It is vital to understand and analyze the different execution techniques that the service provider will use to implement digital transformation mechanisms. Even modern-day data analytics techniques must be known well to them and need to be implemented. A variety of metrics and measures must be calculated to ensure the key performance indicators are well maintained.
Also, it is essential to understand the growth of the service provider on a global platform. Geographically, how many projects have been executed at what locations is important. This shows the diversity of success stories that the IT partner enjoys.
Understand the Escalation Mechanisms
For a digital transformation project to run successfully, the escalation mechanism must be understood very well in-depth. Understand the digital consultant’s escalation methods, how well they will respond to escalations and how quick, how easy it is to reach their higher levels of management in case of need. All these parameters must be well thought of right while choosing the partner.
There must be a proper grievance redressal mechanism that must be in place to ensure a smooth and fast interaction between the solution provider and the client. If all goes smoothly, there is no need for such a system, but in case of any escalation, a good definition of these processes surely helps.
Review the Architecture and Infrastructure Thoroughly
However good the digital partner is, it is better to have a detailed review of the architecture and infrastructure they possess and help companies achieve their digital transformation objectives. It is vital to review from the partner what sort of architecture they are planning to use in the projects, are they going to use open-ended APIs, which standards they are going to follow, etc.
Understanding these questions right from the start will help understand the consequences that can occur while the transformation activities are going on. Architecture is an important and complex area that needs a detailed look, without which it will be difficult to dig through the hidden complications.
Final Thoughts
As such, there is no fixed way you can choose an ideal digital transformation partner for your organization. But it is an important decision and must be taken with a lot of thought and foresight in mind. These tips are sure to help you ascertain if your choice is beneficial for your organizational needs or not.
After all, your digital consultant is the one who is going to oversee your digital transformation process and bring it to reality. Hence, it must be well chosen and best to the core!
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