Digital Transformation Recipe: A Guide to Achieve Efficiency
Picking up from where we left off, the section of Digital Transformation knowledge share would have to continue to amaze you, our dearest reader, by showing how to go digital in style. What do we mean about style? Well, the answer is efficiency.
The impact of Digital Transformation can be huge in every area of your business. By going on this path, you will define and shape your foreseeable future. So, why not make it fair and square, by touching every single button in your company and uncover even the most hidden needs that could turn out to be pure gold if you address them.
Let’s begin with an exercise of imagination! Think of the people in your office, having discussions about food options minutes before the lunch break. They know for sure that they are hungry, but they don’t know exactly what to order. The reason is that there are too many menu options and they are not familiar with the terminology used in the description and the list of ingredients. Thus, they cannot take a decision, not being clear if they will like how their food choice will be cooked, if it will be too sweet/salty/spicy for their taste or will cause them allergies. As a result, they remain hungry long after lunch due to prolonged discussions. The solution here is to call a specialist that will discuss with every single one of them, finding what they like, what diets are following and finally if they are allergic to some ingredients. Based on the outcome of the survey, he will be able to propose the best dish for every single person. Now the food order can be made, guaranteeing that everyone will be happy with their selection.
Let’s map the previous analogy with Digital Transformation. The hunger is your need to become or to remain successful in a competitive environment that is continuously changing and where new challengers continuously appear. This can always be achieved by increasing your business efficiency and address the list of planned objectives that you set up for the short, medium and long terms. The food specialist could be represented by someone in your organization or a specialized company like Cicada Technologies, that will run a set of surveys and interviews regarding every operational aspect, map all the business processes and moderate brainstorming sessions for identifying the most suited solution for your particular case. The restaurant is the software house while the food order is the digital solution that will be implemented for your company. Exactly like a high-quality dish, the delivered digital solution will keep you healthy and give you the needed power to do what you are good at. It is important to understand that exactly like hunger, the need for Digital Transformation will appear again, thus the entire process has to be reiterated continuously at regular time intervals, depending on the dynamicity of the domain in which you activate.
Now, if you decide to make your own company audit, you can start that by opening the door of every department and start gathering the complete set of information regarding how things are done, the existing ways of working and operational processes executed. The best way to document this phase is by using the Business Process Modeling approach. The outcome will be an analytical representation of the current processes in your organization, giving you a clear picture of the interactions, actors, and data flows, being a starting point for all the meetings focused on eliminating inefficiencies. Last but not least, you will need to gather the feedback regarding the overall experience of your customers, employees and suppliers.

Step 1: Model existing processes — by using Business Process Modeling techniques, you can put all details of the process you are working with, down on paper.

Business Process Modeling (Copyright Tallyfy)