Today, the implementation of digital transformation often gets lost in the endless strategies & back-to-back meetings inside corporate boardrooms. Apprehensive of making mistakes, CEOs are averse to putting their money where their mouth is.Fortunately, transitioning from ideation to execution, while not easy, is certainly not impossible. The key is to adopt time-tested & pragmatic strategies. In this article, we discuss five such strategies that will facilitate digital implementation at a macro level.Define your needsYou have heard this one a dozen times – today, to start or run a successful business, all you need is a laptop and a mobile phone. Instead, the most important thing that any business needs is a vision.What is your business about? How are you going to create value for your customers? How is that going to translate into shareholders’ value?Once your vision and mission statement is done and dusted, you can then proceed with the digital implementation. If you are a manufacturing unit, you can choose to adopt technologies that will help you with your six sigma accreditation. If you are an animation studio designing content for your overseas client, you can pay for the services of online file-sharing software that enables you to upload terabytes of information that can be accessed from anywhere.Remember, your business needs are going to drive your digital implementation and not the other way around.Make sure everybody’s on-boardThis is, by far, one of the biggest reasons why digital implementation succeeds or fails.Employees are the biggest assets of any organization. Consequently, they are also its biggest stakeholders. If you are planning to implement a front-end AI chatbot, make sure you have buy-in from your sales and marketing teams. If you are looking to introduce them in your customer service operations, your manned call-centres should be trained accordingly. Otherwise, they will not be able to efficiently handle the real-time transfers from the automated conversations.Become digitally literateIn marketing parlance, professionals often use the following adage – physician, heal thyself. They are referring to advertising agencies, urging them to brand themselves before acquiring clients.The same thought can be applied here. Before you choose to implement digital changes within your organization, it would be prudent to develop at least a working knowledge of the technologies you will soon be deploying. This approach has dual advantages.One, you will have much higher control over the project. You will be able to use the disruption in the best possible way to help your business. It will also help you to avoid operational pitfalls.Two, your technology vendors will not be able to take you for a ride. When you possess a proficient knowledge of the innovation you are working with, it becomes harder to fool you. You know which implementations are feasible, how much time it should take to complete and at what cost.Automate the manual tasks firstAt first glance, this factor may sound like an odd-one-out but bear with us. This seemingly operational aspect often makes or breaks large scale digital implementation.It is always easy to digitally transform simple and repetitive tasks. It is cost-effective too.More often than not, enterprise software companies already possess e-frameworks for repetitive processes. These platforms can be seamlessly integrated with existent company systems without extensive customization or personalization.With the manual operations taken care of, you can then proceed to transform more complex processes unique to your business.Take risks and accept failuresNo matter how prepared, disciplined or organized you think you are, when undertaking digital implementation at a company level, you are bound to suffer setbacks.Sometimes, deadlines will not be met. On other occasions, the costs related to one facet of the project will balloon out of proportions.Man proposes, God disposes. In the movie Contact, based on the book by world-famous author Carl Sagan, a scientist hands over a suicide pill to the astronaut, saying, “There are 1,000 reasons we can think of to have this…but mostly it’s for the reasons we can’t think of.”Do not be deterred by naysayers or temporary failures. It is alright to lose a few battles as long as the war is won.With so much digital implementation going on, companies are keen to execute the same smoothly. A seamless digital implementation boosts morale, increases productivity, encourages innovation and reduces attrition. An unplanned one does exactly the opposite.If you are looking to transform your business with the help of our state-of-the-art digital services, give us a call today.