Mindset: Transitioning from point-of-transformation to ongoing evolution
What’s left to do after digital transformation? If you’re thinking about it correctly, a lot.
We’ve collectively arrived at a point in which digitization is so normal and expected that the goal of achieving a moment of transformation will become irrelevant. But evolution, on the other hand, won’t stop.
Incrementally enhancing your digital efforts is now the cost of entry for the global market.Imagine an organization with leadership that invested in an optical character recognition (OCR) solution a decade ago to replace manual entry. The impacted teams would have found that switch transformative. Suddenly their employees didn’t need to devote dozens of hours every week to the tedious, manual transfer of data, and the output had fewer errors than ever before. Transformative technology swooped in and changed everything!
But how long did that satisfaction last?
Soon, solutions evolved to take those capture capabilities further and further. Where traditional OCR software was limited to recognizing and digitizing letters and numbers from unstructured data, its abilities stopped there.
Today, technologies like intelligent document processing (IDP) and intelligent process automation (IPA) have built on that original OCR technology to provide much more value across the enterprise. Not only can IDP recognize and extract data, it can also classify, validate, verify and deliver that data to the next system in the process using robotic process automation (RPA). In comparison, that OCR solution of yore seems downright quaint.
Does that mean the organization that implemented OCR a decade ago made the wrong choice? That the “digital transformation” it celebrated then was eventually discovered to be a flop? That the organization should have waited for the technology to work out its kinks and become a better version of itself before investing?
Not at all.
The initiative would be a flop only if the organization stopped paying attention immediately after the transformation — if it considered itself transformed and lost sight of the subtle shifts in technology that their competitors were taking advantage of.
Leveraging a digital transformation mindset for digital evolution
Again, digital transformation is not a concept to be looked down upon. In many ways, having a digital transformation mindset is crucial to your digital evolution success.
First, the enthusiasm and innovation mindset behind early adoption of a solution are incredibly valuable. An organization’s willingness to take a risk and implement a technology before it goes mainstream not only speaks to its priorities and reinforces a culture of change management, it also puts it in the right place to nimbly adjust to disruptions as they arise.
A 2021 study by Forrester Consulting found that while more than 80% of organizations had their operations disrupted by the pandemic, those that began 2020 with a strong content services strategy in place demonstrated leadership in resiliency and capacity for digital transformation.
In short: They recovered more quickly and effectively.
When organizations across the globe were faced with the prospect of transitioning to a fully remote workforce essentially overnight, they saw the collapse of paper-based processes.
“Processes that are critical to day-to-day operations but assume that workers and files are in the same place crumble when most or all employees are working from home,” the study said.
Everyone felt the disruption, but those still relying on paper and manual processes had a much steeper hill to climb than those that had already begun digitizing their processes.
Those that had strategically digitized their content and processes before it was necessary still needed to evolve, but the evolution came more naturally — it felt like an update rather than an overhaul.