How to Choose the Right Approach to Digital Transformation for Your Business
Published: 02/06/2025
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Starting business digitisation is the first step that will determine its flow and success. For this reason, it’s important to choose the right approach to digital transformation, and in this article we aim to aid you with that.
It’s past the time businesses have the luxury to choose whether they want to pursue digital transformation or not - it’s a must to remain competitive in absolutely any modern industry. However, it’s never too late to start. So, if you’re looking to embrace it fully only now, you’re not hopelessly behind. In fact, you have the advantage of threading the paths that have been paved. With multiple established approaches, the first step towards transforming your business is choosing the one that’s right for you.
In this article, we will explore the existing pre-established approaches and the factors that should influence your choices. However, keep in mind our recommendations are general and every business is different. If you’d like a more thorough assessment that’s tailored for you, please get in touch.
Digital maturity is measured by assessing how well you integrate digital technologies into your company as the whole. Different areas have different sets of metrics and benchmarks that help you evaluate your company’s current standing.
There are multiple strategies and approaches to digital maturity assessment and, if possible, it’s best you hire a specialist. However, if you need a quick and not too in-depth report, you can measure it yourself by looking up industry-best quantitative metrics for each area and comparing it to your current data.
At this point, digital transformation is fairly well defined and, therefore, there are the basics you need to have a firm grasp on prior to kick starting it. Visibility and understanding of them will help you find the approach that aligns best with your business setup, current situation and future goals.
There’s a total of seven core areas of digital transformation: customer experience (cx), operational processes, business models, workforce enablement, technology infrastructure, data & analytics and culture. You need to touch upon all these areas, as, despite sounding vastly different, they’re all closely interconnected. The challenge is deciding what should be prioritised. Ideally, you should be progressing all of them simultaneously, but it’s also a very complicated task that most companies have no skill or resources for. So, before anything, break each area into smaller categories that then allow you to map out your further journey in a planned, controlled way. For example, for operational processes, focus on leveraging real-time data and analytics. At the same time, you can target cultivating an agile and innovative mindset in the culture area, making the changes easier to stick to by making your team more adaptable.
The right approach to digital transformation lies within gradually introduced step-by-step changes in the seven core areas. Breaking them down into smaller chunks will help avoid getting overwhelmed, especially when working on several things at once. Additionally, progressing slower but across all areas makes changes easier to adapt to and establishes a more natural flow, leading to an easier transition. However, while this is our recommendation, ultimately you should follow the pace that suits your business best.
With digital transformation being a non-negotiable progression for every business, there are now eight clearly defined approaches. However, two of them are the most common ones as they suit the majority of businesses: the bottom-up approach and the technology-driven approach. The latter is quite self-explanatory - it focuses on enhancing capabilities through new tech tools, and while it is more costly, it can also bear very quick ROI.
The bottom-up approach is a little trickier as it begins with individual departments or employees. Instead of starting to transform the whole company, you focus on specific executives within the teams to be the primary adopters of the core area approach. If the process is deemed successful within its initial steps, you will normally start rolling it out in other departments too as it carries on. The goal is to gradually take all the teams to the finish line, eliminating the siloes and centralising them all in one location.
As the name ‘digital transformation’ suggests, you will be needing quite a few new digital solutions to support the new setup of your business. But with the market as wide and filled with options, finding the tools that fit your needs is difficult. However, it’s still under the umbrella of figuring out the right approach, so let’s talk about it.
Even if you’re only embarking on your digital transformation journey, you most certainly use some sort of digital tool to aid you in your day-to-day. While it may be tempting to abolish your old systems when taking on the new route, hold your horses. If the tool is doing its job and you’re overall satisfied with it, your approach to digital transformation should be built around it. Treat it as a starting point and build on it for it’s a solid foundation that offers you heaps of historical data that’s crucial for further optimisations.
One of the key requirements for a successful business digitisation is an easily accessible centralised hub. Every new tool you bring on board should integrate seamlessly with what you already have in place. Such an approach will diminish departamental siloes, making collectively recorded data available for everyone, which, in turn, can lead to unexpected opportunities when put in different contexts and processed from different perspectives.
It’s great to have big ambitions, but when choosing the right approach to digital transformation, you need to balance them with a pinch of reality. Namely, how much financial resources you can dedicate to it and what does sustainable scalability look like to you. You will need to invest during the initial stages, for digital solutions specifically. Since most of them run on a subscription basis, you need to account for having the funds for the duration of your contract. Now, let’s touch upon why you don’t want to scale too fast.
Scalability is a buzzword we hear, associated with the idea that faster and bigger means better. However, scaling too rapidly and too big is often the downfall of businesses as they don’t get the chance to adapt. If you’ve just undergone digital transformation, quick scaling will deem it inefficient and even damaging for your reputation, as you won’t even have a moment to adapt. Hence, scalability should also be mapped out and pursued with a gradual approach.
Finally, despite digital transformation being focused on adopting technology to enhance your company’s efficiency, your living employees are an irreplaceable part of your success. It’s therefore important they are on the same page and willing to embrace digital transformation. However, it’s not always smooth sailing.
One thing to keep in mind is that no matter how well researched and good a fit your approach to digital transformation is, there’s always a risk of running into internal opposition. Especially when it comes to long-term employees who are used to doing things a certain way and don’t anticipate the idea of changing their day-to-day.
Enforcing rules won’t work. It will either breed resentment or your workers will return to their old ways behind your back, skewing the data as a result and not achieving the KPIs you’re expecting. The best way to address this issue is to point out the benefits of digital transformation to your employees individually, rather than what it brings to the business. Considering running some training sessions to show how the new approach addresses their everyday challenges, specifically, and how it will aid them in their processes. Additionally, keep yourself open to hearing out their concerns and complaints, then work together to address them. Most people oppose the change because it brings inconvenience. But if you prove them the opposite, not only will they eventually accept it, but they will also bring the results you may not have expected.
Among the core eight methods, choosing the right approach to digital transformation is not an easy task. However, the most common and recommended ones are the bottom-up and technology-driven approaches as they’re the smoothest, especially when following the linear timeline of transforming several core areas simultaneously. The secret is to break them into smaller chunks. That way you don’t get overwhelmed by addressing multiple aspects of the business and get to plan them out in a pace that suits your business.
Even if you weren’t actively pursuing digital transformation before, it’s guaranteed you’re already utilising digital tools. They can serve as a great starting point to build you gradual move around, as well as shape your general approach as they already carry historical data, so don’t rush to dispose of them. Additionally, adjust your mindset regarding scalability - can you afford to scale fast, or will you need a more gradual growth? And finally, communicate the uses of digitisation to your teams on the individual level to manage internal resistance and smoothen their gradual adjustment. Ultimately, there are no wrong approaches - but there’s the right one for you.
Wondering which one it is? Let us consult you.