How can you measure your digital transformation progress?
The main objective for digital transformation endeavours in any business is to improve their inefficient workflows or automate excessively manual processes.Many companies are undergoing Digital Transformation by leveraging the latest technologies to drive up their business and increase their ROI. An example on point could be migrating from legacy systems to cloud-based platforms.
However, while many companies look forward to the change, they are met with various challenges, such as fear and resistance to the cultural change.
It, therefore, comes as no surprise that less than 30% of the businesses undergoing digital transformation succeed in their efforts, according to research by Mckinsey.
Measuring your progress by having a digital transformation scorecard for your key performance indicators, is essential to understanding your success in this journey. You can identify possible weak points for you to correct, ultimately achieving greater organizational transformation and improving performance.
In this article, we’ll discuss 5 key metrics to use to measure the digital transformation progress for your enterprise.
Let’s get started.
1. Cost of Digital Initiatives
How much are you spending on your digital transformation initiatives?The cost of digital technologies is among the key digital transformation metrics you need to monitor to determine if it is proportional to the amount of revenue they generate.
According to Statista, companies are injecting a lot of resources into digital transformation, and it is projected to reach a total of $7.8 trillion in direct investments between 2020 and 2024.
This, therefore, means that if you are allocating only a small proportion of your budget towards digital transformation, it is highly unlikely that it will yield high returns.
However, you still need to maintain a balance so that you don’t overly digitize; past a certain point, the law of diminishing returns applies.
This would mean that you are spending too much on digital transformation initiatives for few processes, ultimately leading to poor adoption in the business.
Learning how to measure digital transformation success with an investment plan is essential to helping you reach this balance. Accordingly, you must monitor the resources you spend on technology while measuring the percentage of digital investments that influences your revenue.
Cisco Cloud Security was outgrowing its data storage. Challenges with its infrastructure were becoming too costly and resource-intensive to support.
However, they were able to find a scalable cloud solution (Matillion) that saw the Content Intelligence team reduce expenditure by 84% in ETL application.
2. Rate of Adoption and Performance
A high digital adoption rate is among the most critical business transformation metrics.
It simply shows how well your employees are using business and digital transformation tools to improve their performance in the workplace.
A digital adoption platform is a great solution in learning how to measure digital transformation progress. It enables you to view how users are embracing digital technologies and analyze where you may have possible friction and bottlenecks that reduce their usability.
With such insights, you can understand where individual users struggle in the process, underutilized features, and where to improve usability for better digital adoption and performance.
Realizing that some features are underutilized may indicate that the tool isn’t as relevant to your employees’ needs as you had thought initially.
A digital adoption transformation platform, apart from giving insights into the users’ struggles, can show you where you need to give training, introduce automation with content intelligence tools, or simplify processes.
Sophos wanted to take advantage of all updates coming from their new CRM but with so many processes, users had trouble keeping track, and as a result, they weren’t adopting technology quickly.
As a solution, Sophos adopted a digital adoption platform, Whatfix, which enabled them to improve employee training efficiency so that users could adopt CRM features fast.
3. Workforce Productivity Indicators
Are your employees able to perform complex tasks more efficiently?One of the best tips on how to measure digital transformation progress is through employee productivity.
This essentially refers to the volume and value of results delivered relative to the amount of time spent on tasks and the resources invested.
Every investment you make towards your digital transformation initiative should support your business goals and help you achieve them as desired.
To get an idea of where your digital transformation is headed, you need to calculate the amount of revenue each employee generates.
Workforce productivity as one of the key digital transformation metrics is indicated by employee engagement throughout the process, optimization of work hours, and more time for strategic thinking through automation tools.
For example, if you leverage tools like Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) to digitize invoices, accessing them should take less time than if it was done manually.
Stibbe relies on the existence of a text layer in all files for effective enterprise searches but the scanned files lack that layer and the manual process of retrieving documents negatively impacts staff workflows.
With DocsCorp, OCR Software, Stibbe was able to find non-searchable content by indexing over 28 million documents and automatically converting them into text-searchable PDFs.
4. Return on Digital Investments
Are you maximizing your ROI with digital transformation?
If you’re directing enough resources to the adoption of digital transformation, one of the crucial things you need to do is measure if your initiative is yielding high returns on investments.
For this reason, you should not only look at the value you gain from individual digital initiatives but also how the initiatives collectively support your business strategic goals.
Remember, digital transformation is not an overnight process, and neither is their room to stand still and wait for results, otherwise you will fall behind your competition.
It is more about making investments while putting in efforts to avoid losses, but also yield high returns.
To maximize returns, I would, therefore, recommend transforming one business domain, be it the employee or customer at a time and broadening traction from there. This allows you to save on time and expenses by leveraging similar technologies for the same datasets.
In addition to that, you need to put in place change management initiatives that encourage digital transformation adoption for a higher return on investments. According to a study by McKinsey, businesses that successfully scaled Data Analytics Software were 4 times more likely to spend half their analytics budgets in adopting change management.
However, if your employees don’t engage with technology as you expected, it means the technology isn’t powerful enough to make the shift from their current manual work patterns.
One of the ways for measuring digital transformation success is by comparing the number of employees utilizing digital tools to the number of licenses you purchased.
If you have a well-planned digital transformation strategy but employee engagement is still lacking, your efforts do not bear the desired results.
Some of the metrics you can use for your employee engagement digital transformation scorecard include:
With regards to end-user engagement, you must ensure that the digital tools make it easier for them to perform their jobs effectively.
You can do this by addressing their pain points. This can be through improving the user experience with content intelligence tools that automate their workflows, such as processing business documents.
Experian adopted Salesforce for employees to manage client relationships but noticed there were low engagement and satisfaction ratings. They needed a way to reduce training and onboarding time, and therefore, used Whatfix to create in-app guidance that ran throughout the training process.
However, this is challenging for many businesses and most of them end up avoiding monitoring digital transformation altogether.
According to reports by Gartner, almost half of all businesses lack business transformation metrics to measure their digital transformation.
Having gone through the key metrics to measure your digital transformation progress, such as user engagement and performance and rate of adoption and participation, I hope you can now use them to determine if your digital transformation initiatives are successful.
Start by leveraging OCR software to automate workflows and improve digital adoption in your business.
Are you maximizing your ROI with digital transformation?
If you’re directing enough resources to the adoption of digital transformation, one of the crucial things you need to do is measure if your initiative is yielding high returns on investments.
For this reason, you should not only look at the value you gain from individual digital initiatives but also how the initiatives collectively support your business strategic goals.
Remember, digital transformation is not an overnight process, and neither is their room to stand still and wait for results, otherwise you will fall behind your competition.
It is more about making investments while putting in efforts to avoid losses, but also yield high returns.
To maximize returns, I would, therefore, recommend transforming one business domain, be it the employee or customer at a time and broadening traction from there. This allows you to save on time and expenses by leveraging similar technologies for the same datasets.
In addition to that, you need to put in place change management initiatives that encourage digital transformation adoption for a higher return on investments. According to a study by McKinsey, businesses that successfully scaled Data Analytics Software were 4 times more likely to spend half their analytics budgets in adopting change management.
5. User Engagement and Participation
Measuring digital transformation requires your employee and user-engagement participation levels to be high for success.However, if your employees don’t engage with technology as you expected, it means the technology isn’t powerful enough to make the shift from their current manual work patterns.
One of the ways for measuring digital transformation success is by comparing the number of employees utilizing digital tools to the number of licenses you purchased.
If you have a well-planned digital transformation strategy but employee engagement is still lacking, your efforts do not bear the desired results.
Some of the metrics you can use for your employee engagement digital transformation scorecard include:
- Exit rate
- Net Promoter Score
- Employee satisfaction index
With regards to end-user engagement, you must ensure that the digital tools make it easier for them to perform their jobs effectively.
You can do this by addressing their pain points. This can be through improving the user experience with content intelligence tools that automate their workflows, such as processing business documents.
Experian adopted Salesforce for employees to manage client relationships but noticed there were low engagement and satisfaction ratings. They needed a way to reduce training and onboarding time, and therefore, used Whatfix to create in-app guidance that ran throughout the training process.
Conclusion
Measuring digital transformation progress in your business is essential for gaining insights into its success and determining where you may need to improve.However, this is challenging for many businesses and most of them end up avoiding monitoring digital transformation altogether.
According to reports by Gartner, almost half of all businesses lack business transformation metrics to measure their digital transformation.
Having gone through the key metrics to measure your digital transformation progress, such as user engagement and performance and rate of adoption and participation, I hope you can now use them to determine if your digital transformation initiatives are successful.
Start by leveraging OCR software to automate workflows and improve digital adoption in your business.
