What is the importance of establishing a Digital Transformation Office?
In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, customers and beneficiaries seek to meet their needs immediately and in a simpler way and for cheaper wages while ensuring high quality and a high level of satisfaction. Modern organizations try to meet the needs and aspirations by taking advantage of the opportunities that digital transformation has introduced into our lives in various fields.
The importance of having an office for digital transformation in modern organizations stems from the fact that digital transformation is a journey and not a project that has the beginning and end of the digital transformation phase that includes moving from point A to point B and then to point C and thus it is a continuous process that requires an organizational unit responsible for:
- Change the culture of the organization.
- Rationalize spending on digital transformation.
- Developing the capabilities and digital skills of workers in the organization.
- Raise the level of maturity of operations.
- Keeping pace with the rapid developments in modern business models.
- Knowledge management.
- Control plans to benefit from digital technologies.
The gap between the development of digital technologies and business
In recent years, a strange phenomenon has been witnessed in the acceleration of digital development, where the processes of development take place as layers, while the pace of business development is linear, which has led to the disappearance or drastic decline of entire business sectors and the emergence of new sectors through new employers who depend on various digital capabilities.
Let’s take a look at some of the rates of evolution of data processing speed according to Moore’s Law. Data processing power is doubling every 18 months and it is expected to accelerate more during the next period and at the same rate and perhaps faster the speed of communication and storage capacity will develop.Therefore, many organizations seek to establish an office responsible for monitoring this acceleration to ensure the preservation of the sustainability of the organizations’ growth in light of the waves and fluctuations of the fourth industrial revolution.
Unfortunately, according to recent reports, the failure rate in implementing digital transformation ranges between 70 to 84%, according to Forbes, where the causes of organizations’ failure in digital transformation vary, for example:
- Lack of knowledge in the field represents one of the most important reasons that lead to failure.
- The employees, managers, and leaders are not aware of the real challenges surrounding the organization.
- Another problem is the organization’s inability to understand the drivers of the digital transformation of the organization itself.
- Many employees are not prepared to change their behavior.
- Many leaders and managers do not allocate enough time to change the behavior of workers in the organization They do not spend enough time changing the corporate culture and are unable to empower workers to make the right decisions for themselves.
What is the digital transformation office?
A Digital Transformation Office is an organizational unit, for example, a group, physical department, or virtual division within the organization responsible for designing, developing, and updating the strategic plan for digital transformation and implementing the operational plan to ensure the sustainable development of the organization.The purpose of establishing a digital transformation office?
Many purposes encourage organizations to establish a digital transformation office, and direct and indirect goals vary according to the nature of each organization, but the main purpose is:
- Reshape the way the organization thinks.
- Reshape the way the organization operates.
- Reshape the way the organization provides its services and products.
- Reshape the way the organization interacts internally and externally.
- Reshape the way the organization communicates with beneficiaries or clients.
Where indicators of the success of the digital transformation office appear in any organization when it can transform the challenge of digital transformation into a positive opportunity for the organization by adding many new competitive advantages to the organization, leading to changing the business model.
Here, we would like to emphasize an important point that we see absent from many workers in digital transformation offices, as we see them more focused on business automation initiatives, while they are required to focus on transforming business models, changing the culture of the organization, improving workers’ skills, improving ways of communicating with customers and beneficiaries, and commitment With flexible management practices and moving under the umbrella of digital governance and digital asset development.
It is also necessary to pay attention to the methods of data and information flow within the organization, how to access it, and ways to share knowledge and wisdom, leading to empowering workers at different administrative levels within the organization according to a matrix of roles and responsibilities.
How do we establish a Digital Transformation Office?
The initiative to establish a digital transformation office needs:
- Effectively raising the level of skills within the digital transformation office and within the facility itself.
- Adopting an agile and comprehensive methodology.
- Determine the appropriate measurement standards for the organization.
- Focusing on products and services for customers and beneficiaries without neglecting the products and services that help the employees of the organization accomplish their work.
- The ability to effect changes in the organizational structure of some establishments.