What is the Digital Transformation?
The digital transformation is not just one thing or activity, but an entire process by which companies enhance the digital technology in their businesses, using it to change or create new processes, cultures, and customer experiences, optimising all the activities right from the start. The process can vary from one company to the next, depending on how the technology is applied and implemented.
Many ways lead to digital transformation and its changes, and every organisation’s journey will be unique. A company might add AI as a tool for optimising the customer experience or for developing new strategies to make its daily team routines more efficient. The organisation’s operations are rewired by the constant evolution and integration of technologies that improve its functions.
To be successful, the digital transformation calls for a variety of coordinated activities: it is a long-term effort with continuous adaptations and changes.
Defining Digital Transformation Strategies
- Transformation business strategy: The technological route you opt for now will decide your company’s success.
- Realigning business operations: What do your customers and employees need most, and how can digital processes help? The design of better processes can be based on these questions.
- Adoption of new practices for agility and experimentation: As customer expectations mount and the pace of change quickens, new ways of working need to be introduced. To be successful, the digital transformation needs to pursue a varied approach that pays heed to the availability of technologies and human adaptability.
- Flexible core technologies for sustainable change: By staying flexible, you can catalyse innovation across your enterprise and form ecosystem partnerships more easily to drive speed and scale. It is important not to get stuck with just one technology. Openness to new possibilities and improvements allows for fast and sustainable changes, while keeping the needs of your client or team in focus is key.
- People management: How can technologies enable better knowledge sharing and collaboration? What should the future of work look like? Technologies face workers with new challenges, but can also solve many of them. To make them work, the digital basis, digital operations and digital skills of the workforce all need to be supported by the management and a culture that welcomes new technologies and seeks the best ways of integrating them in everyday life.
Digitalisation vs. Digital Transformation
Even if the mention of digital transformation will automatically make you think of digitalisation, it is important to emphasise that the two are not the same. Digitalisation can be seen as an integral part of the digital transformation process and one of its ultimate pillars. But what is important even before this point is to first identify the requirements and possible improvements between teams and customers and their systems, and then set up a process for changing the culture and adapting routines to the new system installed.
Digitalisation is mostly about technologies – their application to change a business and automate business processes, step by step or rolled-out as a project – whereas the digital transformation is not, but can include digitalisation as an integral part in its continuing quest for new procedures while paying greater attention to people and their attitude to changes in the company culture.
What does the digital transformation mean for FI Group?
In FI Group, too, the digital transformation is brought about in the most diverse ways, all aimed at providing added value for clients and employees. The digital transformation here proceeds incrementally in a stream-aligned structure – a model of organisation and team interaction where squads with digitalisation strategies for services in various areas globally develop and manage digital tools for teams and clients.
Applying new ways of systematising documents and data is meanwhile another operative element of the digital transformation – the establishment of new organisational methods facilitates and speeds up the work and access to required information.
More locally, we also have our Scientific Department, established by FI Group France in 2019, which leads the research relating to artificial intelligence and NPCs, aiming to enable a regular scientific and technological supervision for proposing new approaches and supporting R&D Financing Consultants in their daily missions.