So, What Exactly is a Digital Transformation?

One of the big questions we hear at Poeta from potential clients is, “so what exactly does a digital transformation entail?”. The term itself is fairly broad, and encapsulates a variety of services and technologies, depending on the client’s needs. 

In this week’s blog, we are going to answer that question, as well as dive into some of the major steps in completing a digital transformation, and how they will improve your business. 

Let’s take a look! 

What is a digital transformation? 

Digital transformation is, “The process of using digital technologies to create new – or modify existing – business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation” (Salesforce, 2022). 

Essentially, it's utilizing modern technologies to adapt your business to the modern world, improving your working processes, communication, and efficiency at the same time.

Why should you consider a digital transformation?

If you're a part of a legacy business, this type of work should absolutely be on your radar, as you better believe it’s already on your competitors’. When you start to think about a digital transformation, you get to take a long hard look at your current processes and services, and how you connect with your customers – and more often than not, you will start seeing some areas for major improvements. 

Utilizing a digital transformation can completely change the way your business operates, and even create entirely new streams of business for you. Embracing modernity and revamping your operations flow allows your business to be adaptable to future changes in your industry, and lets you give your customers the personalized interaction they crave when they’re spending their hard-earned cash. Before you get started, take a look at all available technologies and begin considering how best to adapt your business towards them for both internal operations and external customer-facing practices.

The 4 steps of a digital transformation

While every Digital Transformation process looks different depending on the businesses needs and how old they are, there are a few key pillars that make up the basics of a digital transformation to keep in mind.

• IT Uplift:

  This process refers to the upgrading of your companies original IT infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, data centres, and even updates to cloud architecture. Lowering IT maintenance costs and increasing employee efficiency in the process. 

• Digitizing Operations:

  Digitizing refers to the process of taking something analog, and converting it into something digital. This is no different, just more complex, and involves moving your processes away from tools of the past and embracing the digital age. In some cases this becomes more about re-architecting your organization from the ground up, and in others it simply means swapping out your massive server systems and embracing the iOT or AWS cloud services. 

• Digital Marketing:

  In the year 2022, everyone is online all the time, including your potential clients. So, in order to turn them into actual customers, you need to be online as well – and building an online presence that beats out your competitors is no easy feat. This process might involve revamping your website with proper SEO and SEM tools, building up your social media presence, running Google or LinkedIn Ad campaigns, or even started a YouTube Channel to showcase your services. Get online, start experimenting, and see what sticks – the more data the better here. 

• Recognize new opportunities:

  As you complete the digital transformation process, in addition to recognizing areas of difficulty or improvement, you may as well identify new work opportunities that you may want to pursue going forward. You might use this opportunity to create new business models, offer new products, or even pursue collaborations with a partner company to further broaden your services. Now that your business is modernized, shifting your focus is less expensive, and keeping ahead of the curve is easier than ever. 

How can we help?

Poeta Digital are experts in digital transformations, and have worked with some of the most recognizable brands in the industry, such as Azuqua, Microsoft, and IBM, to complete them. Recently, we partnered with Amazon Web Services to add cloud computing services to our offerings, including various app modernization and lift and shift services that take your existing technical architecture to the cloud. Our team has spent 14 years helping companies innovate, so if you are thinking about a digital transformation yourself, we are always happy to chat. 

If you would like to see how we have helped in the past, consider taking a look at some of our case studies and related services.

Conclusion: 

So what is a digital transformation? A digital transformation is all about building technology into your business to impact the way that you operate and deliver value to your customers. This technology should make your life easier and make your customers happier. 

We hope this blog was informative and answered any questions you might have on this topic. If you want to learn more about digital transformations, consider checking out our other blogs on the subject, such as How to Make the Most out of Your Digital Transformation or 3 Signs It is Time for Your Digital Transformation. 

As always, if you have any questions or want to have a free consultation, get in touch with us today. We love to chat.

Thanks for reading!