7 Digital Transformation Challenges Leaders Need to Overcome

Change is hard in any capacity. Digital transformation is typically one of the biggest changes any organization will face. With it comes a variety of challenges for leadership and employees. Overcoming these digital transformation challenges is critical for a company to evolve and thrive.

So, what’s keeping leaders up at night when it comes to digital transformation?

Your Strategy Is Lean or Non-Existent

Moving a company toward digital transformation doesn’t just happen! It’s the culmination of planning. That should start with a strategy. If you haven’t set the direction and what you hope to accomplish, everything else you do, from adopting advanced technology like automation to enhancing network capabilities, won’t matter.

The absence of a strategy often means your employees are resistant to this change because you haven’t explained to them its value. That can result in failure. In fact, 70 percent of digital transformation projects fail because of this. Thus, you need a roadmap that’s visible to all and highlights how you’ll change and what the benefits are.

Misalignment of Business Goals and Digital Transformation

Even if you have a strategy for transformation, that doesn’t mean it will help you meet business goals. Lots of tech tools improve workflows and processes, but if they aren’t relevant to your business and what it wants to achieve, it’s just bells and whistles you don’t need.

To avoid this, map out business goals and define what technology innovation will allow you to reach them. It’s a time for being practical, not visionary. Further, you’ll be more agile in whatever pivot comes next when you do this. It’s great to think long-term, but don’t forget about the shorter-term needs.

Lack of Highly Skilled IT Professionals

Skills shortage is another digital transformation challenge. These gaps keep businesses from reaching transformation goals. This roadblock is often more severe for SMBs with IT staff that have to manage all operations. Without these skillsets, it’s hard to evolve your IT ecosystem and reach ideal business models where technology solves problems and improves efficiencies.

The most appealing way to break through this barrier is by relying on technology partners. Don’t think you have to go it alone. When it comes to areas like deployment of communications and collaboration platforms, you can leverage providers that supply the product and deploy and manage it. It becomes one less thing on your list.

Meeting Customers Where They Are

Your customer is an important stakeholder in digital transformation. Thus, the strategies you put in place must align with their expectations around the channels they want to use. For example, many customers prefer digital interactions over calling.

As a result, an omnichannel approach to customer support is necessary. Integrating this into one platform that manages voice, chat, and email creates simplified processes. In turn, you can delight customers and make things easier on your agents.

Providing Tools That Enable Work from Wherever Securely and Reliably

The shift to hybrid work models means you must support in-office and remote workers. In the haste to ensure business continuity in early 2020, many organizations rushed to get their team remote ready. They made quick decisions on the tools, often hobbling applications together and not thinking through the deployment and security implications.

Now, it’s time for the “COVID cleanup.” Companies must reassess their tools, security posture, and network footprint. That is likely to spur the adoption of integrated, security-first platforms. Enabling your team to communicate, meet, and share and access documents is critical to their performance.

In addition to the security leniency to keep work moving, the new paradigm also added more devices, including BYOD (bring your own device) and networks, to their threat landscape.

Anything that increases risk is on the mind of leaders. While we can all agree that digital transformation is crucial for businesses to survive and thrive, it can’t be at the expense of security and reliability.

Overcoming this goes back to what solutions you use and how they address them. In choosing new applications, ask the hard questions about security, including who is responsible for what. You’ll also want to discuss reliability and uptime to discern how confident you can be in the technology.

The Budget Quandary: Investing in the Present and Future

The digital transformation challenge that lingers in the minds of leaders the most is, “How do we pay for it?” Modernizing new processes and launching new platforms and tools are all costs, but consider what you may be saving. For example, if you bring in one unified communications (UC) platform that helps you eliminate three other standalone widgets, there could be savings there, too.

Additionally, deploying automation or anything that boosts productivity can result in outcomes that reduce costs. The key is to be strategic with your dollars. Spend on things that will future-proof your operations, not restrict you from growing.

Fully Embracing the Cloud

Cloud communications is essential to digital transformation. Its adoption quickly accelerated, but some hesitancy persists. To support a modern workforce, you’ll need to embrace it. That’s because it removes location as a requirement for connection, syncs data, and enhances security. All these capabilities are critical for your transformation journey.

Continuing Your Journey to Transformation

Digital transformation challenges don’t have to halt your journey. There are ways to overcome what’s holding you back. If part of that is finding the right cloud-based tools, explore our solutions today.