Digital Transformation Strategy: A Checklist For Businesses

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Green Irony in April 2022 and has been updated to reflect the latest data.

No matter the industry, if your business is using native integration capabilities from Salesforce or building a reusable API that manages data access through MuleSoft, you are at risk of missing the mark on key business objectives if you don’t focus on creating an agile digital transformation strategy.

To achieve successful digital transformation and meet customer expectations, you must be innovative—but not just for the sake of keeping up with new technologies. You need to marry business and technology to create an agile business model with processes that can be scaled for the future. But where should you begin?

Digital Transformation Pain Points

First, you need to assess your current roadblocks. Use the following checklist to evaluate if your business is experiencing any of these digital innovation pain points:

✅  You’ve purchased new technology platforms, but don’t know how to leverage them properly.

As technology platforms continue to boom, companies are purchasing an increasing amount of SaaS solutions for their business as they consolidate their digital processes. However, new ways of doing business often require new skills to be learned. Struggling to leverage these platforms properly can come at a high cost. 

✅  The time it takes to connect all of your data is painfully slow.

Most businesses are used to writing a few APIs or scripts themselves. However, one pain point your business may be facing is the inability to rapidly integrate and utilize all of your internal and external data sources across the entire organization. This friction can put you a step behind the competition and can be detrimental to your business goals. 

✅  Technical expertise and bandwidth are simply not available, especially on small teams.

Even if your company has connected data, it may lack the technical expertise or bandwidth to scale projects easily and efficiently with API-led technology like MuleSoft. Whether you need to implement reservation booking, chatbot features, or loyalty programs, it’s likely that your data won’t be accessible or accurate. 

✅  Digital transformation projects ramp up quickly, but ultimately crash and burn.

Many companies and business leaders looking to gain a competitive advantage in the digital world will start too many projects at the same time without a cohesive vision or strategy in place—leading to major initiatives failing. When businesses move at lightning speed without a plan, the probability of crashing and burning is imminent. Many businesses soon discover they have the technology in place, but don’t have a corresponding long-term strategy necessary to truly leverage their digital tools. This not only affects your bottom line but can also decrease employee engagement and satisfaction, leading to greater turnover.

If you’ve identified with one or more of these common business problems—or if you’re newly in a state of panic—take a breath and keep reading.

3 Tips to Create a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Keeping up in today’s digital age is necessary, but not easy—and there is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. Here are a few of our top suggestions to help you effectively implement an agile business strategy:

1) Gain alignment on your business goals.

Defining your desired business outcomes requires getting the entire executive team on the same page when it comes to processes, including how to navigate your current technology roadblocks that keep you from moving forward.

Unfortunately, gaining alignment across your entire organization is easier said than done. Our recommendation is to use your company vision as the backstop for all decisions and strategies. A healthy vision can make it clear what the right choices are when deciding on future projects, scope, and priorities. From here, determine how to fulfill that vision by accomplishing your set business goals.

2) Understand your data and integration needs for leveraging new technologies.

In order to realize your company’s goals, you need access to data and an understanding of the process. This means you need to connect to various systems, orchestrate calls between them, and combine them through business processes. The resulting data then needs to flow to the people and systems that need it, using data models that make sense across the organization.

However, building out a digital model of your organization that spans all of your internal and external systems is a daunting task. Though businesses are seeing an immediate need for the data and business logic to realize business outcomes, they lack an overall strategy and roadmap to execute against.

3) Create a digital transformation strategy.

You know which goal completions will lead to cost savings and revenue generation. You know you need system and data integrations to achieve those business goals. But where do you start? How do you move from your current operating model into total business transformation?

You need a digital transformation strategy that aligns your IT organization with the business organization. You need an agile approach that enables the creation of reusable assets that lay the foundation atop which you build your integration application network. You need to showcase ROI by measuring the success of new business processes through metrics and KPIs.

Blending Strategy and Execution with a Digital Transformation Consultancy Partner

Enter: Green Irony. We are the partner that specializes in blending strategy with execution to assist in your company’s digital transformation journey. We marry business outcomes with system integrations on MuleSoft by developing and executing integration roadmaps with defined and measurable ROI. We are constantly finding new ways forward in today’s digital world.

Bring your company into the 21st century—build your digital transformation strategy with Green Irony today.