Moving to digital is not only a trendy thing to do but is a business imperative in the post-pandemic era. From increasing productivity and revenue, streamlining data management to enriching customer experience, digital transformation offers multiple benefits.

Digital transformation begins with the creation of a digital transformation strategy that is aimed at fully leveraging the opportunities and the potential of new technologies. The digital transformation journey requires a clear roadmap and a staged approach that involves multiple stakeholders and going beyond external and internal limitations. As the transformation is an ongoing journey, the roadmap needs to be flexible enough to allow goals to move.

The six stages

Digital analyst and author, Brian Solis describe that an organization goes through six stages when moving from traditional to digital that includes:

- Status quo — The company in this stage is content to maintain 'business as usual' status using tried and tested formulas. There is a rigid mindset that is averse to experimentation with digital. For transformation to occur, the first step is to change the rigid mindset and embrace a flexible, experimentative approach. Digital transformation puts strategy and people before technology.

- Present and active — This is the stage where the company conducts small digital experiments to assess feasibility. For instance, you can test free cloud services to handle traffic and deliver an improved user experience.

- Formalized — Once you have proof of concept, you can move on to larger and more intentional experimentation to secure leadership buy-in.

- Strategic — Different units and departments collaborate with each other and share actionable insights to expand digitalization. A strategic roadmap to digital transformation is created at this stage. Digital infrastructure is developed by adopting cloud-based tools, operating software, integration of new applications and digital platforms, and so on. Business process automation and optimization with robotic process automation and other new technologies.

- Converged — This stage involves appointing a dedicated team for digital transformation that establishes goals, puts in place the digital infrastructure, tools, and systems to effect transformation. While digital transformation involves several teams four essential roles include the CIO (Chief information officer), Digital adoption manager, digital transformation specialist and digital product manager.

- Innovation — The digital culture is now firmly embedded in the business while IT managers, leaders or CIO establish a system to monitor market and technology trends to ensure ongoing innovation. New business ecosystems and networks of stakeholders and partners are built to achieve digital transformation success.

The traditional company now evolves into a data-driven organization and relies on data insights to make decisions while transforming core operations from physical to digital. The digital company leverages data to design tailored products/services and enrich customer and employee experiences.