What is Digital transition?

A digital transition typically involves automation of repetitive tasks, integrations between business tools to reduce turnaround times, and improving efficiency using available digital tools. It makes incremental improvements on how business is conducted using digital tools while still adhering to existing processes and best practices. 

Business transformation isn’t the goal of digital transition; instead, it should help businesses in identifying areas for improvement and new opportunities. 

Why is Digital Transition Important?

As the data gathered by a company grows, it becomes more challenging to manage. Storing physical documents means there’s always the threat of lost records, human error, natural disasters, and more. With the available digital tools today, it’s more practical to transition into digital processes because it also helps you future-proof your business. 

Below are the main reasons why you should consider a digital transition as soon as possible.

Cost Savings

Digitization helps reduce overhead costs and repeat work compared to managing physical documents and files. Locating, sorting, and storing physical records and documents takes more time than simply doing a search for files on a computer or mobile device. It often requires a dedicated person or team to manage physical records.

Inaccurate records and lost files have a financial impact on the business, especially if you lose a file that’s irreplaceable. According to IBM’s Cost of Data Breach report 2021, the costs of data-breach related issues rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million—the highest average total cost in 17 years.

It can be hard to put a monetary value on a particular file or record, but losing files or data will have a negative impact on the business. This could mean that your employees will have to spend time searching for the files, you may need to hire more people to help find or replace the files, or at worst, take it as a loss and move on.

Enhanced Efficiency

Managing physical documents takes more time and can be a source of delays. This is increased significantly if an employee needs to make copies and distribute them to different teams in different locations. This doesn’t factor in the time and effort needed if a specific document or file is old or hard to find.

Human error is also a main consideration here since everything is done by hand, which means data accuracy and speed of delivery is dependent on the proficiency of the one managing the document and its distribution. There’s also the problem of machine error; if a copier or other tool is not functioning properly, this could lead to delay or failure to deliver the document.

These problems can be solved by a digital transition. Using digital solutions can cut down record retrieval and delivery to minutes instead of hours or days. Documents become more accessible because you have a central repository for all relevant files. Employees need not worry about time-consuming physical file archives and data retrieval and can focus on more important tasks.

Modernization

A digital transition is the first step toward the modernization of your business. By leveraging technology and using advanced tools, employees become more productive and increase their digital proficiency. Consequently, this helps reduce costs and improves business processes, which leads to increased customer satisfaction, more sales, and increased revenue.

A digital transition also helps provide a deeper understanding of the rationale behind digital initiatives and speeds up digital adoption across the organization. It helps in updating existing systems and adopting new ones where necessary. 

Cloud service providers are also available to help complement your digital initiatives and provide tried-and-tested digital tools and processes in place. Using the cloud for file storage and other services helps save space, provides additional security for files and documents, and makes information accessible to members of the organization regardless of location.

Digital Transition vs. Digital Transformation

Digital transition is a process that companies have undergone to take analog information and convert them to digital formats, e.g., conversion of paper documents into digital documents or web pages. This transition into digital helps several industries because it allows businesses to manage files and documents more efficiently.

Although digital transition and digital transformation has been discussed often and sometimes used interchangeably, the former is merely a component of the latter. Digital transformation involves much more considerations than the digitization of company assets. Limiting the scope of digital transformation to the simple migration into digital fails to uncover the true potential of the process and may hinder true business transformation.

Unfortunately, digital adoption for many businesses has been slow due to employees not fully understanding the impact of digital transformation to the business as a whole. However, companies can reduce disruption during implementation of digital workflows by employing agile platforms that help deliver solutions quicker and more efficiently with minimal friction. Agile platforms allow employees to adapt to newer technologies without thrusting them completely into unfamiliar territory so they can adjust to the new processes.

A proper digital transition also empowers employees to use new technology without relying on IT teams and personnel. Finding Business Intelligence (BI) platforms that are intuitive and easily configurable will encourage employees to use digital tools and eventually make them more proficient and productive. 

Ultimately, digital transition shouldn’t be a company’s reaction to the current business landscape but a proactive approach that will prepare it for future opportunities while future-proofing it through the use of modern technology and processes.