Digital transformation is used rather flippantly, and most executives have lost their faith in the term. That's a mistake. Before all the hyperbole, take out the "fog" in the word soup and suddenly a company's promise of helping to replace slow, manual and disconnected processes with solutions that can perform in the market speeds that customers demand today becomes more real. It's not about taking the trend-jacking approach. It's about survival. Google spreadsheets passing round different departments, legacy software that takes 6 clicks to do what should only take one, and websites are designed for 2014's internet – these are not “behind the curve” business, they're working at a disadvantage to their competitors who have already done this. Digital transformation – understood the right way – is the conscious decision to rebuild your company's operating and customer-facing systems to be agile, fast and integrated without having to create a six-month IT project whenever your market changes.
The concepts of the Core Pillars of an Agile Business Ecosystem are explored further in this article.
Resilient digital operations are built up on a handful of core layers, which must function as a whole – as singular investments or optimizations they don't.
However, it's only natural to think about Cloud infrastructure as the first place to start—and there's a reason for that. There's more than economics to moving workloads off on-premise servers; they enable the ability to scale. For a retail company needing to use ten times the usual number of servers in its system during a seasonal rush or for a logistics company wanting to bring up a new regional database in a matter of hours, the old technology installed in a server closet is just not an option. Cloud platforms make infrastructure agile, that means that customers don't need to wait months until the infrastructure is installed; they can just provision it on demand. But in most cases the migration is not an easy process. But legacy systems are often constructed with stovepipes, proprietary architectures and unwinding a myriad of multi-decade dependencies is often the most difficult part of the transformation path – in most cases not the choice of cloud provider.
The next is "unified collaboration software" which corrects an easily underestimated problem -- fragmentation. If sales lives on one tool and project tracking takes place on another and internal documentation resides on yet another tool that no one updates, there are information silos set up that impede the processes of decision making and adds to duplicated work. While it may sound obvious, modern collaboration platforms integrate all the communication, task management and document sharing into one operational layer, and it impacts on the agility of the teams' execution.
The automobile data analytics is the third pillar. Manual reporting – when someone has to export the numbers to a spreadsheet once a week, is really a time lag in the business. Near real-time trends are surfaced by automated analytics pipelines, which enable decisions to be made based on the latest data, rather than a snapshot from last month when it comes to pricing, staffing or inventory. In fact, this is what frees up human teams to perform the real work, requiring judgment, that don't require the same repetitive work (invoice processing, lead routing, customer onboarding sequences) and which are automated by workflow tools.
These three are not only modernizing a business, but also are making a business pivot capable. But that agility has to be accompanied by an external measure, too, since if it's all shiny and dazzling on the inside but still left in the past on the outside, then it can't be as efficient as it claims to be.
Maximising the Front facing Infrastructure for Maximum conversion
- - Literally, the Web site serves as the front door. All the other transformation projects that are going on – automation, cloud computing, analytics – are back-end projects that no one knows about, but the website is the one thing that every customer, investor and partner sees upfront and the first impression they get of the company's capabilities.
- - Over-evolved CMS = Growth tax #1. In many cases, the internal structure of company content management system can have a history of multiple plugins, unused themes, database overheads that can lead a firm to experience laggy portals and increased hosting bills, thus getting modernized but bleeding cash and conversions through their slow portal.
- - Enables you to avoid that overhead in light weight frameworks. This is where services such as BTO Themes (https://www.bloggertemplate.org) help - their “light weight” tend to be SEO blogger design templates that release the unneeded code areas that a lot of typical CMS platforms have a tendency of building up, which is actually the kind of “cosmetic surgery” as well as “tactical” execution to take into consideration straight, using their site, evaluating their loading time times with your existing load times.
- - Speed of mobile sites affect the site's visitors, whether they stay or leave. Those few seconds difference from a converted customer to an abandoned session are enough more at stake when most traffic has changed its form to be mobile centric, so templates that are optimized for mobile front-end at first (not Desktop retrofitted!) must be considered in any front-change.
- - Many businesses don't realize the issue with it and premium adsense friendly layout is the solution. The template will be placed around the ad placement; here the layout is created with the monetization zones right from the beginning; this aspect is important to be discussed with your specific ad network and adhered to in order to place ads without problems — don't bolt the monetization zones on after the fact and position the ad-placement structure around them in an awkward manner.
- - Conversion Funnel is the direct hit point of designs such as Quick Spot which are speed oriented. They are trying to minimize the load time, get rid of the clutter and make it easier for a user to get to the content and action you want them to perform: filling out a form, making a purchase, subscribing, etc.
- - The first impression of a website is fast and clean - before they read one word, they already have a positive impression. People make up their mind about a brand's website in the first few seconds of the visit, before they even read or interact with any of the content, an out-of-date or slow site can affect a brand's credibility, no matter how solid the brand's business is.
- - Registered with various framework changes, it's not a customized application development cycle. Instead of ordering a custom-made, optimised front door—often a time-consuming process which requires engineering teams, deploying an optimized template is a way to modernize the front door within days, freeing technical teams to concentrate on the more in-depth transformation work that is taking place internally.
How to cost-effectively scale Content Hubs & Authority Portals
However, after the basic setup, usually the next step of transformation is around visibility - creating the content infrastructure which will help in attracting customers organically instead of paid acquisition. That's where authority-based blog and resource pieces, and structured knowledge bases come into play. A great performing content hub serves two purposes: it can educate potential customers about the issue that your business can solve, and it can build search authority over time - which, as opposed to paid ads, builds value in such a way that it compounds over time.
Most companies face a challenge in this area, with regards to cost and speed. A built-from-scratch content platform, in terms of design, CMS integration, technical support, etc., takes a long time to develop and a ton of money—compared to the time it takes to get a successful content strategy off the ground, especially for smaller brands. This is where a pre-made, built and stable layout comes in. For instance, Wind Spot or other free blogger templates can be found through BTO Themes, and can provide a business an appealing security, removing any requirement to wait in a development queue to start a business blog right away. The "bell-curve" isn't only for aesthetics—it means that the business can begin publishing while their custom-built option would still be in design review, it can begin ranking for keywords and it can begin becoming a topical authority.
Speed is as as important as security and stability in this case. If the content hub fails or gets hacked, then it's credibility gets shot down, so it's important to check out the reliability of the template — and there is a history of uptime, frequency of updates and user reviews to gauge that before investing a long term content strategy on it. But if done correctly, this can enable a company to view their blog as a product like any other – it builds value the longer they operate it, and doesn't need a wind unit project to maintain it.
Change is an ongoing process, a Continuous Journey of Transformation.
The road of digital transformation has no end, and no every executive seeking the solution where it should end will be ever be disappointed. It is not so much an untouched process, however a sustainability practice to discover and get rid of friction, no matter in which it might be concealed, be it in a antiquated database, in a siloed team workflow, or a web site that can't load in four seconds on a mobile phone. Not all of the top tech spenders are the ones that gain the advantage. It's they who think that speed, simplicity and structure cleanliness is a must-have for both the inside and the outside, front door that the customers enter before all others. The discipline is what keeps companies from being just another name to talk about transformation and move them ahead of others that are waiting for the right time to begin transformation.To be true on the issue of accuracy: When I was writing the BTO Themes sections I was trying to make the best case I could that lightweight templates are important and what things to check out before implementing this product as your template — so I wasn't trying to give concrete performance data, security or AdSense optimization specifics because I can't independently help verifiy that data. If you have any documentation, benchmarks or case studies from BTO Themes, I could make those areas more specific than general with some documentation/sourcing, if you have any that would be great.
