Three Reasons You Can’t Delay Digitising Your Business

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to design digital workplaces or “offices in the cloud.” These environments enable companies to allow flexible and remote working for their teams. I also teach the digital literacy, fluency, communication and collaboration skills needed to work in these modern technology-rich workplaces.

Many traditional businesses have felt that digitisation is something reserved for tech companies or businesses that are in the IT field.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here are three reasons to get your strategy in place to digitise your business, essentially creating a digital workplace. The longer you delay the larger the gap will become between those in your industry that do and those that don’t.

1. Your customers expect it. This expectation has been created by experiences they have had elsewhere. As they experience the efficiency of dealing with a digitised business elsewhere so their expectations grow to have the same experience when dealing with you. Having to deal with manual processes is painful (and quite frankly necessary) and customers will gravitate towards those organisations that are able to minimise the pain of manual interactions by digitising those.
2. Digitising internal processes can have dramatic cost and time saving implications, and in some cases savings of up to 90% can be realised and turnaround times can be dramatically improved. For example, one bank digitised it’s loan application and decision making process, cut the cost per new loan by 70% and slashed the time to approve a new loan from several days to just a minute! There are hundreds of examples like this. Who do you think digitally enabled customers are gong to gravitate towards?
3. When you replace paper and manual processes with software it allows you to automatically collect data that can be mined to better understand your business. Data collected this way can create real-time reports which allow you to address problems before they arise or even indicate immediate direction changes! Data driven businesses are smarter.

There is no time to lose in putting a strategy in place to being this process. There is not a single industry where someone in the industry has not already started this process or is very far along with it. That means that your competitors are likely starting down this road as we speak. Don’t underestimate the impact digitisation is going to have on who gets to lead your industry. The decision really is whether you want to lead or follow. Digitising your business will help you be in the leading pack.