Digital transformation is a primary goal for many organizations - 70% either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one. But not every digital transformation project is a success. In fact, in a single year, more than two-thirds of the money spent on digital transformation may end up going to waste. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that digital transformation - for all the hype and excitement it generates - has been cited by directors, CEOs, and senior executives as their number one risk concern.
These twin facets of the digital transformation boom -risk and reward - need to be balanced by organizations across a broad swathe of industries. What’s more, with the pace of digital change showing no sign of letting up, this balance needs to be realized as quickly as possible.
The three Cs
One area of particular importance to digital transformation initiatives concerns SAP projects. One of SAP’s main advantages as digital transformation gathers pace is the opportunity for integration. Whether they center on blockchain, the Internet of Things, Big Data, or machine learning, today’s SAP projects need to be fast, agile, and proactive to not only keep pace with the rate of technological change but anticipate and get ahead of it.
Ironically, one of the primary reasons that digital transformation fails is a myopic focus on technology. Here are some other areas you should focus on first:
Collaboration
One of the most important factors in successful digital transformation projects is collaboration. For example, a recent SAPinsider report found that 37% of respondents cited ineffective collaboration among business teams as a challenge holding back change management and testing.
Effective digital transformation projects should begin with internal changes. This means encouraging communication between different personnel, business units, and even external partners. According to McKinsey & Company, eight in 10 respondents to a global survey on digital transformation said that their change proposals involved either multiple business functions or the entire enterprise.
Culture
A BCG study of 40 digital transformation projects found that companies focusing on culture were five times more likely to achieve breakthrough performance than those that neglected culture. When implementing digital transformation, culture should be transparent, open, outward-looking, and proactive.
Culture can also play a vital role in fostering collaboration. A collaboration culture can help promote synergies between IT and business teams by breaking down silos and enabling the dizzying pace of change that accompanies digital transformation. A true collaboration culture goes much further than the occasional team meeting or brainstorming session.Your workplace culture should also be felt by all your employees. Quality is everyone’s responsibility - don’t leave it to your IT team or software testers.
Customer experience
If there’s another area of the business landscape that moves with the same pace as technological change, it’s customer expectations.In today’s market, organizations need to make the customer experience a central tenet of their digital transformation journey - whether they generally engage with customers via a mobile app, a wearable, or a web platform.
At Qualibrate, we’ve seen firsthand how important customer experience is to digital transformation. When asked to modernize warehousing solutions for one of our clients aspart of an ERP project, we were surprised to find that our introduction of anew mobile application to replace the use of pen and paper actually led to a decline in productivity. We discovered that the cause of the decline was a lack of familiarity with mobile technology among some of the staff. We shifted our approach by implementing voice recognition technology instead. This led to the kind of digital transformation success that simply wouldn’t have been possible without taking the customer or user experience into account.
Rapid change, reducing risk
Even taking the above three factors into account, however, many organizations remain fearful of digital transformation. But all change comes with risk - successful digital transformation is simply about managing it. Otherwise, risk aversion can lead to underinvestment and sluggish responses to customer and market shifts.
For SAP customers currently pursuing digital transformation, software testing takes on added significance in terms of risk management around change initiatives. Traditional approaches to testing simply aren’t fast enough to enable digital transformation at the pace required. This means their critical processes can start to get bogged down, new iterations suddenly take longer to release, and customer-facing applications start providing less than optimal results. This is where Qualibrate comes into its own.
Our quality assurance and testing solution for SAP projects can help you reduce risk around your new software solutions and build confidence among your IT department. We understand that the cost of failure is high - our automated testing provides an insurance policy for enterprises that allows them to pursue digital transformation without fear.
Qualibrate is a three-in-one SaaS solution for enterprise software delivery that provides native support for automating tests on SAP applications (as well as over 40 non-SAP technologies). But this makes it sound as though Qualibrate is just another piece of technology.
On the contrary, Qualibrate helps foster the kind of collaborative culture that is required for a successful digital transformation project. By reducing the effort required for testing activities to take place by up to 80%, we are able to safeguard application quality and promote synergies between your various business teams.
The desire to modernize, to embrace digital transformation in all its forms, is clearly there. But something is holding organizations back. Testing tools are undoubtedly part of the solution but they won’t lead to digital transformation on their own. Leverage your tools to give your employees the ability to deliver high-quality apps faster and with less effort. Use Qualibrate to create the right culture and environment that lets collaboration flourish. Then, digital transformation will follow.
Learn more about how Qualibrate can optimize your digital transformation project today. Read about our successful automation of the entire technical standard change process at a global specialty chemicals leader here.
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