These are some key digital transformation Strategies to unlock new business Opportunities

Business organisations worldwide focus on emerging technologies in the dynamic digital landscape to adapt their IT strategies to changing market conditions.

Organisations must develop innovative digital strategies to align with new business models and identify new opportunities, goals, and priorities. Organisations must invest in integrated solutions and consider the long-term impact of emerging technology choices on interoperability and digitally transformed services (DTS) to harness new business opportunities.

What's DTS?

DTS refers to processes, operations, or systems transformation by incorporating emerging technologies. This transformation leverages digital technologies to improve customer experiences, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation. So it's associated with a paradigm-shift towards utilising emerging technologies to improve businesses, streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and create innovative business models.

DTS is also seen as an opportunity to build dynamic capabilities, renew strategically, use a collaborative approach, change organisational culture, enter new markets, and gain new customers. Understanding users’ behaviour, preferences, and cultural shifts needed for DTS is challenging. Therefore organisations must develop new skills, infrastructure, and capabilities to design, develop, and implement digital service offerings effectively.

These transformed services aims to make services more agile, flexible, efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly. By digitising processes, organisations can streamline services and enable customers to access the needed information and resources. DTS requires new ways of working and innovative service delivery models to attain these.

Changes are necessary for organisational policies to ensure the emergence of digital platforms, infrastructure, and technologies. DTS is a comprehensive effort to review business processes and offer products and services beyond traditional digitisation. 

Besides, organisational capabilities are needed to manage service delivery processes and value creation. Adopting emerging technologies can be challenging for service organisations as the scale and scope of changes still need to be clarified. The required digital infrastructures and dynamic market offerings are increasingly stressing the sociocultural nature of DTS.

Challenges

While digital transformation can bring numerous benefits to organisations and customers, there are still several gaps, such as dealing with digital cultural change, goal-oriented strategic practices, and required digital infrastructure, revenue generation approaches, sustaining digital changes, and empowering digital capabilities to implement DTS successfully. 

Organisations must explore DTS objects like technologies, new business models, workflows, internal processes, and innovative service offerings. The decision-makers, service providers, entrepreneurs, managers, technology developers, marketing professionals, consultants, and academicians would benefit from this article in formulating and implementing strategies for DTS to deploy potential ways to utilise value-creation opportunities. With a focus on improving users’ experience and needs, a customer-centric approach is required to develop a DTS roadmap. 

The government must establish standards and guidelines that organisations must follow to ensure consistency and interoperability across different systems and services. Regulations related to data privacy, security, accessibility, and other areas must be considered while developing digital transformation strategies. The government can enable digitally transformed services by facilitating an integrated enterprise system for stakeholders to support cooperation. 

Organisational changes can also impact the culture and mind-set of the working people. For example, a shift towards a more agile or innovative culture may require changes in how technology is managed or used. Organisations must highlight the gaps between existing capabilities and the changes necessary to accomplish the new technology vision.

Strong Leadership

The organisational changes require strong leadership with a clear vision for how technology can improve the delivery of services. Technologies and massive data can support management in designing new solutions for management problems. To enhance the organisational capabilities, reassessment of the existing workforce, skills, infrastructure, and culture is required to accommodate DTS. DT strategies can be crucial in selecting, adopting, and implementing digital technologies. 

DTS requires a significant cultural shift and organisational resources to drive organisations to adopt digital technologies. The organisations must assess their current technology landscape to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. This involves forming or reorganising new teams to ensure alignment with change management, cultural shifts, and digital transformation objectives.

Formulating a DT strategy should consider the current talent landscape, identify areas where new skills are required, and develop a plan for attracting and retaining talent. DT strategies also consider how technologies will be managed over time. This includes establishing upgrades, maintenance, and organisational support processes to utilise emerging technologies effectively. 

Infrastructure 

Digital infrastructure includes networks, servers, storage, data centres, and cloud computing platforms. It facilitates the integration of digital technologies with other systems and platforms, enabling seamless data exchange and interaction. The innovation can be fostered by introducing digital platforms. Digital technologies drive the need for robust, scalable, and secure digital infrastructure.

Emerging digital technologies like AI, cloud, automation, block chain, augmented reality, virtual reality, met averse, and IoT platforms can improve dynamic capabilities. The digital infrastructure promotes remote working culture, online collaboration, and video conferencing, which can enhance the workforce capabilities of an organisation. Digital workforce capabilities can enable collaboration and knowledge sharing, allowing teams to work together efficiently and improve data-driven decision-making by allowing organisations to respond to changing customers’ preferences.

Digital technologies increase real-time customer support, feedback mechanisms, and rapid service delivery, which can improve service flexibility. Digital technologies enable integrating different services and provide greater flexibility in service delivery. DT widens the scope of new business models, value propositions, and customers’ experiences for greater service flexibility. Service flexibility requires employees to have a broad range of skills to adapt to changing market dynamics.

By leveraging data analytics capabilities, organisations can get insights into customers’ preferences and trends analysis and develop more personalised and targeted digital service offerings. Digital service innovation can drive the development of advanced features and functionalities to increase the value and usability of digital artefacts. 

Organisations can increase users' engagement to improve the users’ experience of digital services. By enabling rapid prototyping and testing of new digital services, digital artefacts can help organisations to iterate and refine their service offerings quickly. Organisations can advance with successful digital transformation by empowering employees, formulating a vision, providing support, and developing strong leadership.

New Opportunities

The emergence of digital technologies and digital infrastructures transform innovation and new business opportunities in significant ways. Digital workforce capabilities can drive the adoption of digital solutions among end users by promoting digital literacy among customers. The service transformation flexibility helps to achieve DTS, as it can increase accessibility, improve responsiveness, and ultimately improve customer satisfaction with the services offered. 

A comprehensive analysis of DTS would benefit from integrating both soft technological determinism theory and institutional theory. Soft technological determinism emphasises technology's role in driving change, and institutional theory considers how organisations and societal norms respond and adapt to technological advancements.

The interplay between these theories underscores the complexity of digital transformations and their implications for societal and organisational practices. This holistic approach would acknowledge the role of technology as a driver of change while recognizing the institutional factors in shaping the processes, context, and outcomes of digital transformation efforts. By considering both perspectives, organisations, solution providers, and policymakers can develop effective strategies for navigating the complexities of DTS. 

Conclusion

Organisations must deploy adequate IT strategies to consider emerging technologies to leverage faster service delivery, quality, automation, revenue mobilisation, and value creation. Policymakers, technology developers, and service providers must focus on DT strategies, organisational changes, digital infrastructure, and implementation of emerging digital technologies, as these drive DTS.

Organisations must build digital workforce capabilities, services transformation flexibility, digital service innovation, digital competencies, and digital artefacts to pace digitally transformed services in a competitive digital marketplace.