Why Digital Transformation Is About Evolution, Not Revolution

Going digital isn’t a one-off event. If your business is to make the most of all the opportunities that twenty-first tech can offer, it needs to go on a journey. At ImagePlus, we’ve become expert guides to the road ahead.

Many business owners and decision-makers still remember those early months of lockdown in 2020. A lot of us spent time putting in place technological solutions that ultimately responded well to the huge shifts of that period. And for many, remote working tools adopted out of necessity have also proven their long-term benefits.

But have your business’s technologies evolved since? Have you a plan for reviewing your digital tools and seeing what might need to change or advance in future? One-off “black swan” events shouldn’t be the only time we evolve our digital provision: every business should be evolving over time.

How Digital Evolution Can Help

A continuous approach to digital adoption encourages an active engagement with your business processes. Understanding where your systems could benefit from support or improvement can unlock learnings about where new software might empower your workers – and enhance your bottom-line.

There are a range of benefits that digital evolution can unlock:

• Cutting costs
• Improving efficiencies
• Reducing risk
• Saving time 
• Generating better data

Are your staff bogged down with one project or another? Are you still overly reliant on paper or on cumbersome communication? Do you make the most of the data you gather, and have you deployed it to achieve business improvements? How efficient are your processes, and how could they be made more so?

When you understand the answers to these questions, you can look to digital to help make change. 

Making Digital Work For You

At ImagePlus, we usually start not with tech but with talk. We advise our customers to go over their business in some detail with their digital agency: together, you need to put together a clear vision of where software might help, and how. Before any code is written, the best projects begin with clarity.

For instance, many businesses are much better at customer-facing digital than internal systems. Apps for your clients, websites for them to view, ordering systems and social media channels: today, a lot of businesses (though of course not all!) have decent solutions in place on this side of their business.

That makes sense – attracting and growing a customer base is the fundamental goal of every business. Placing resource into achieving that should naturally be a priority.

But this means that businesses often miss out on the huge benefits that digital can bring in terms of bridging gaps in how they work. From automating regular tasks to making communication between dispersed teams easier, digital can bring your staff together, make their jobs simpler, and inform their work with better data. Digital can get to work for you inside your business, too.

Achieving Continuous Improvement

Crucially, ensuring you are always evolving digitally isn’t about having to buy off-the-shelf software. After all, this typically incurs a very large investment and involves a big project across the whole business.

Instead, specific tools can be developed quickly and inexpensively. These are designed to perform that one particular task very well. In other words, you need an app: at their best, apps are specific and precise, and make a single task that might once have been onerous suddenly easy.

Think about digital transformation as a sustainable – and achievable – long-term investment.  Using bespoke web and mobile app technology, a business can keep evolving its digital processes in incremental, pragmatic steps. 

Even better, this change can be delivered at a business’s own pace and within its own budget constraints. not forced on it by circumstance. And once you have the ball rolling on a digital process, it’s easy for you to keep building on it.  

Making Digital Happen

At ImagePlus, we can help you map out an end-to-end digital process and advise you on which bits it makes sense to focus on digitising first to achieve ROI.

Let’s make things a bit more concrete. Imagine a form that needs to be completed by staff at a certain time. Currently, they fill it in and email it to someone, or even print it off; with a bespoke digital process, everything is simpler and smarter:

• There will be complete tracking for the business – you can see exactly who has filled in the form and when … and who hasn’t.
• You’ll be able to automatically dictate a certain level of accuracy and consistency in the answers.  The form can be automatically rejected for example if a field is missing or if a photo isn’t attached.  
• You’ll have the ability to send push reminders to your staff so it doesn’t get forgotten.
• You’ll have instant access to the information – as soon as the form is filled in, the data is available to you.
• You’ll be able to change the form instantly – and roll the changes out to your staff just as quickly.
• And you’ll get new insights automatically from the data within the form.

In other words, a single change has created a transformative, smoother process. In fact, we regularly find that moving to a digital process doesn’t just solve the initial problem – it delivers a whole host of other benefits, too. And, by staying alert to change over time, you’ll be able to continually improve.

We have tons of experience in designing digital processes just like this. Take a look at just two of the apps we’ve developed to get a sense of the myriad benefits they can offer. The key is always to make these tools quick and easy for the user: achieve this, and you’ll find that the new process saves time and offers a better experience for your staff. 

The first step on your digital journey might be to pick our brains – we’ve the experience of having developed a wide variety of digital processes across a wide range of industries and can advise where you might expect to receive the biggest benefits most quickly. They say a journey begins with a single step – so why not get started? Contact our team today and we can help you digitise your buisness.