Your company can't become too complacent with its existing value chain — not while the business world shifts rapidly around you. In an era when digital disruption is affecting companies of all kinds and sizes, digital change management has become an indispensable leadership skill.
If you've honed this ability, the current unsettled business climate may represent more of an opportunity than a challenge. By making your company the best at surviving and thriving through periods when old strategies cease to function, you can give yourself a competitive advantage.
The question, then, is how to become more adept at embracing digital business transformation. First, you grasp the effects of technological change on your industry and beyond. Then, you pursue executive education specifically dedicated to the subject.
Read more: Learn what it means to lead a future-ready organization.
Why is it important to employ digital strategies for business transformation?
Future-proofing a company's business model has become an everyday part of leadership, considering how quickly the digital future is becoming the present. Assessing both digital technology trends and potential responses is now a critical skill. A truly modern business should be ready to integrate the most valuable new ideas while avoiding dead ends.
When potentially industry-shaking developments occur, for example, the emergence of digital-native companies in legacy sectors like financial services, existing players must learn how to adapt or risk falling irreversibly behind.
A skilled, forward-looking leader will stay aware of the latest trends, such as a shift in customer preferences toward low-friction mobile interactions, and determine how feasible it is to adopt those practices. Thinking about these issues at the earliest possible opportunity and laying the groundwork for transformation prevents organizations from being caught off guard.
Read more: Learn how to assess your readiness for the era of digital ubiquity.
Changing customer demands and evolving industry standards can be threats to businesses that don't adapt quickly enough, but also opportunities for those that can make the necessary shifts. Targeted research into the latest and upcoming trends will help leaders make plans.
As one of those leaders, you can't be content to simply study what's coming next, however. You will also need to do the practical work of accomplishing the necessary transformation. This means becoming adept at presenting new methodologies to your team, earning buy-in from all corners of the business. While digital technology evolution is often at the heart of industry change, people will have to implement those technologies.
Read more: See how MIT thought leaders have viewed recent business evolutions.
How do you adopt digital business transformation strategies?
Implementing a significant business transformation strategy can involve rethinking your current organizational methodology on two different axes, one outward-looking and more inward-focused.
These are:
- Knowledge of your customers.
- Optimized business design.
These two aspects of business are symbiotic. A great transformation strategy begins with getting to know your customers' needs, as well as the environment they exist within, socially, technologically, and commercially.
When you keep your finger on the pulse of how customers interact with companies, as well as how they want to interact in the months ahead, you're ready to anticipate and serve market demands. Differences in people's daily habits, often influenced by tech changes such as the ubiquity of smartphones, can point the way to larger market shifts.
Anticipating those evolutions and providing a next-generation customer experience before competitors can adapt is one way to improve your positioning amid changing conditions.
Read more: Learn what true successful digital transformation means for businesses today.
The other half of the equation, optimized internal business design, involves applying the latest tech to your own practices. This means assisting modern customers and enabling your employees. Adapting business models to accommodate and incorporate fast-paced, efficiency-building technologies helps you become the partner your customers need.
Some of the most drastic transformations of recent years — such as businesses' moves to become global, cloud-based organizations run in the cloud — have served as competitive turning points. Some businesses have made these transitions smoothly, while others have encountered headwinds.
See more: Discover what it means to be future-ready in a webinar with MIT Center for Information Systems Research Director Stephanie Woerner.
How does executive education help with digital business transformation readiness?
Because digital transformation and future-proofing are now competitive differentiators, there's clear value in studying these concepts directly. Fortunately, MIT Sloan Executive Education offers courses like Digital Strategies for Transforming Your Business that provide best practices for leaders who want to meet this transitional era head-on.
The course consists of case studies, discussions between participants, and exercises alongside expert faculty lectures. Participants learn to use a five-step process to assess their companies' readiness for successful digital transformation. This process involves:
- Determining the right digital business model for you: Not every company will digitize its operations in the same way. By finding a tailored business model that meets your needs, rather than settling for generic practices, you can stand out in your field.
- Identifying your competitive advantage: What's your unique value proposition? Answering this question will help your business stay on track and not abandon its core advantages as you evolve.
- Projecting ways to reinvigorate your practices: Envisioning the next steps for your business, with detailed, data-informed projections, is an important transitional step between your existing operations and your digitally enabled future.
- Assessing your capability for reinvention: Before any company refreshes its business model to suit new digital norms, it has to ascertain whether its infrastructure can stand the necessary changes.
- Determining whether you have the metrics, governance, and leadership for transformation: Specific elements that feed into your company's transformation journey include its capacity for measurement, as well as its data governance policies and leadership's appetite for modernization.
The information imparted in the course is heavily shaped to the needs of participants. This means instead of receiving a generic update on the ways companies can evolve, you see how these principles of transformation apply to your business and its situation.
With input from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, Digital Strategies for Transformation is grounded in the latest expert research into the ways companies are evolving.
Read more: See the value of earning a certificate from MIT Sloan Executive Education.
Get ready to transform your business in the years ahead
Digital transformation capability is not just a trendy skill to possess — it's evergreen, because companies will always have to evolve to suit their moment. The need for change management is a recurring theme among businesses of all kinds, and it's natural for leaders with this ability to be uniquely well-suited to face the years ahead.
The past few years have seen the emergence of widespread smartphone ownership, the rise of cloud-based corporate software, the prevalence of remote and hybrid work, the expansion of data analytics and AI, and more. The transformations will only continue from here.
Whether you're hoping to improve your performance in a current leadership role or to build a strong resume for executive consideration, studying digital transformation is a way to bolster your knowledge. MIT Sloan Executive Education exists to expose participants to this type of cutting-edge business skill in a collaborative, expert-led environment.
Enroll in Digital Strategies for Transforming Your Business and see what the future can hold for your industry.