DIGITIZATION TREND WATCH
Your employees have certain technological expectations that you will have to meet. If you give them the right resources, you ensure more productivity, better cooperation between team members and better communication with customers.
If you don’t do that, you have a chance of employees losing the pleasure of their work. This does not improve contact with your customers. And if the customer experience lags behind, there is always a competitor who wants to take over the customer from you.
What does digitizing look like to you?
You need to find out in which areas you need digitization to align your business with your business strategy. Including objectives such as business growth, cost savings, process improvements and specific project objectives. How do you do that?
If you take the right steps on the road to digitization, the agility and productivity of your employees will increase and they will work better together. Why? Simply because it becomes more fun to work at your company. To begin with, ask yourself three questions: what are your business objectives, which processes are you currently using and with which technology can you bring the two in harmony? In this article we explain in three steps how you can make digitization a success.
1. Take a closer look at your document management
To get from point A to point B, you first have to know what point A looks like exactly. You will find out by first taking a close look at how documents are handled within your company. How is printed? And what does the document management look like? Will you die in the paper? Are there overcrowded filing cabinets throughout the organization? On the basis of these types of questions you will discover which model of digital maturity your company falls into. In this way you better understand how far you are in the digitization process and what course you want to take. Perhaps one of the following three scenarios applies to your situation:
- Lots of paper: to continue the core business, a lot is done by hand and on paper, with some use of digital data management.
- Digital : digital technologies and data are used to stimulate emerging business and your people get insights where they can do something.
- Completely digital: to obtain new business, you organize your activities, processes, etc. in such a way that you can optimally utilize the benefits of digital technologies.
In terms of digital maturity, no company fits exactly within one of these three frameworks. Some have yet to start scanning their paper documents. They still do everything by hand and on paper. Others have already digitized certain processes and are on their way.
Map your document processes
You will therefore determine how ‘mature’ your company is in terms of digitization by mapping your current document management processes. It is important to keep your business objectives aside and to draw up recommendations for next steps. You could actually see all these activities as one step. If you look at the current state of printing and document processing, future business goals also suddenly become much clearer. You can consider engaging a consulting team with a lot of experience in the field of digitization. These people can help you view the existing situation objectively. But whether you involve a consultant or not: by starting to think differently about technology, you will gradually make better decisions.
Digitization experts understand that companies have little use of technology if it does not effectively support their strategic activities and innovation is not forthcoming. By starting to think differently about technology, you will better understand what technology is worth for achieving better business results. But before you come to that, you first have to know which route data is still covered by your entire organization.
Look at your current printing infrastructure
Also check to what extent the current printing infrastructure consumes the time of your IT staff. Companies often do not use their printing technology in such a way that the processes actually run more efficiently and IT people can deal with more relevant issues. Maybe it makes much more sense to trade in your print server for the cloud. This gives your employees more time for activities that contribute to your business strategy. If your print infrastructure is already partially or completely in the cloud and you scan your documents directly to the cloud, you already have a higher maturity level than a company that processes all the print work locally. This is a step in the right direction. Once you have a good idea of your current document management processes, you can explore the possibilities of further digitization.
2. Make your processes more efficient with digital data
According to research agency IDC, “87% of directors claim that digitization is a priority. But we often see that they don’t understand the ‘why’. In short, they see digitization only as a collection of technologies and solutions, not as a means to work towards their business goals. The belief that you have to look for technology ‘because you have to’ doesn’t help you find the right technology for your company. Before you start looking for the right technology, you must ask yourself the following:
- How can we make better use of data to ensure that our technology works better and that our employees can act faster?
- Which manual processes can we automate, so that our people have more time for activities that contribute to the business strategy?
- How do we get a digital workplace on the ground that makes our employees more analytical, flexible, innovative and creative?
Based on the answers to these questions, a future image of user-friendly document processes is formed throughout your organization. With that in mind you will determine how you would ideally digitize your data in a way that benefits user processes from start to finish. Below we will take a closer look at the above questions:
Question 1: Determine whether your company is sufficiently capable of continuing and maintaining the core business. These days we need to be able to exchange ideas and information at lightning speed, but the traditional office is not designed for that. From the answer to the first question you can see at which points fast action matters most for your business. This way you can find out which information processes could use a little more efficiency.
Question 2: Discover how you can promote emerging business. For this, employees on location and at a distance must be given the opportunity to act more flexibly and have time for activities that contribute to your business strategy. You give them that freedom by automating manual processes. Once you have identified which processes need to be automated, you can start looking at collaboration tools that allow your employees to exchange ideas more freely with each other and with your customers.
Question 3: Ultimately, you must determine how you want to create new business in the future. You do this by giving your employees the digital support they need to exchange ideas with each other and work in a more innovative way. With all of today’s workplace solutions you can leave productivity largely to technology and your employees can engage in innovation. This is a future-oriented approach: thanks to digitization , your team can work better on your business objectives.
You can also see digitization as follows: it is a step that allows you to switch from slow, inefficient printing processes to optimized workflows. Once you have determined how you can best store digital data and share it with your employees and customers, you plan how you can optimize this data through user processes. In other words: you are going to plan how to get your team to work optimally.
3. Use digitization to let your team perform optimally
In step 2 you investigated how your employees can use data in a more efficient way. In step 3 you will look at how you can optimally organize all processes throughout your organization. With that you can:
- Give internal and external employees the time and resources to collaborate more easily and effectively.
- Let your employees work better and more productively with handy technology that ensures streamlined workflows.
- Measuring data and making information more transparent for employees, so that they can make informed decisions.
Choose the right technology
Exactly how you look at this step is important. It is not so much about using the technology itself. You want to influence the behavior of your employees by improving processes using the right technologies.
Limit the number of manual operations and make your data processes more efficient. Then you make the difference between technology at home and at work smaller – and you deal with the frustrations among your employees. It is important that you focus on the ‘how’ of the workflows: how exactly must those processes change in order to achieve optimum results? The answer to that question leads you to the specific technologies that match the unique work styles of your people.
Stay ahead of the competition
Have you done little to nothing about digitization? Then remember that today’s economy relies heavily on technology. And also remember that you can only keep up with the competition if you provide your employees with the right tech. Urgent action must therefore be taken. The sooner you start digitizing, the better you can stay ahead of the competition.
DIGITIZATION is not anymore a far from my bed show.
