Creating a digital roadmap for your business should be a key priority as we head into 2021 and beyond. If you haven’t yet started the digital transformation process, then it’s about time you begin the journey. Today we’ll walk you through just what these terms mean for your business, and why they’re essential activities.

What is a digital roadmap?

A digital roadmap outlines the processes your business needs to undergo to align technology and business objectives, alongside approximate timelines for milestone completion.

Creating a digital roadmap is a gargantuan activity, whether you’re experienced in the latest technologies or not, as it involves looking at all areas of your business and assessing where technologies can help assist or streamline operations.

Because of this, your roadmap may focus on key areas of business first, with less-essential or lower-revenue boosting activities relegated to later on down the track.

What are your business objectives?

Examining your business objectives first will lead to technology suggestions to help achieve these goals. For instance, some business objectives may be:

• To increase revenues
• To expand to other locations
• To attract and retain better talent
• To make staff more productive
• To concentrate efforts on core business
• To reduce spend on X

One objective that all businesses should look at is “to reduce manual processes.” When computers can do what humans can do in almost real-time, you get true business savings. Automation is one of the key pillars of the Industrial Revolution 4.0.

What is the competition up to?

Once you’ve outlined your own business objectives, then take a deep look at the competition in the field and try and determine their business objectives. This may require a lot of reading, perhaps some other forms of reconaissance, and an analysis of their historical behaviours. They may already be undergoing the process of digital transformation, which might mean seeing their systems in a current state of flux if you are paying close attention.

Take any lessons learned from the competition and incorporate them into your business objectives and digital roadmap.

Aligning technologies with business objectives

After determining your business objectives, you can start investigating digital solutions to help you achieve these objectives.

For example, let’s take the “attract and retain better talent” business objective.

This objective has a few different strings that we can pull out. Attracting better talent is about both hiring practices as well as making the workplace a more appealing package than the competition. Looking at the second bit there - making the workplace more appealing (which also helps retain staff) - there are a few ways in which technology can help.

Offering remote/flexible working conditions which needs excellent digital solutions to do so, e.g. remote login, bring your own device policies, various communication tools, entire workspace available remotely, etc.

Working with up to date hardware and software makes your workplace more attractive to younger talent. Adding interesting intranet, workplace social media, chat boards, etc. is even better.

Streamlining the interviewing process can also help avoid people being snapped up by the competition because you’re taking too long to progress.

Do you need custom software?

You remember above where we talked about the “reduce manual processes” business objective? Automating these processes may be achievable with off the shelf software, or you may need something custom built.

For instance, if you are still doing manual invoicing (even if designed in Microsoft Excel, then sent via email, and a reminder set for follow up), then you can still remove manual parts of this process, aiming for full automation. For instance, you can use a customer database, pre-populate invoice fields with customer details as well as details from item database, automatically send the invoice, and automatically follow up if funds haven’t been received in the desired time period. This way, the only manual processes involved are entering customer ID and item ID and quantity. This can all be automated if purchasing is done online or customers and items have scannable codes that can be done by a teller.

Of course, there is already commercial software that can do the above, however, for more business-specific processes, you may need to build custom software/automations.

We can help

Determining where you can automate may be tricky if you aren’t familiar with commercial or custom software capabilities. If you are wondering which processes to automate within your business, then come and ask us for an opinion . We’ll be able to outline where you can fully or partially replace manual processes, if there is commercial software already available to already do the job for you, or if custom-built is the way to go.

We’ve helped businesses just like yours with digital roadmap planning and implementation. While our speciality lies in custom-built software, we are experienced in the processes involved in undergoing digital transformation - so don’t hesitate to reach out for a chat.