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How your business can survive (and even thrive) through digital transformation?

Digital transformation (DX) is currently the single most important force in business and innovation.  Leveraging its 13,000 agencies-strong network, DesignRush reported that companies with digital-first strategies are 64% more likely to achieve their business goals than competitors and to succeed in the Future of Work. In contrast, as many as 55% of companies that have yet to digitise believe they have less than a year before they suffer financially and begin losing market share. 

How can you be Digital-First’?

Well, there’s a method to successful digital transformation which McKinsey encapsulates in  five key factors: 

1. Leadership factors

Impactful leaders are committed, enthusiastic, wholly change-driven and digitally-savvy. 

“Top leaders realise that it’s imperative for senior management to keep up with everything from AI to e-commerce to data analytics, or they risk the company’s viability and their own careers,” says the Executive Monitor report from Boyden Global Executive Search that surveyed 1,200 CEOs. 

You need leaders who are agile, committed to change, and ready to invest – recognising that investments do result in payback over time. Research by both McKinsey and Boyden demonstrates that organisations that hire digitally-savvy leaders into the C-suite, such as chief technology officers, are more likely than competitors to report successful digital transformations. 

2. Creating the workforce of the future

PwC suggests that by 2030 we’ll see four possible “worlds of work”. There’ll be the Red World of innovation; the Blue World where corporations dominate; the Green World of a strong social conscience; and the Yellow World where companies recognize that humans come first.  To succeed in this Future of Work, PwC insisted that:

“Leaders need to own the automation debate and realise that Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will affect every level of the business and its people. It’s too important an issue to leave to IT (or HR) alone.” 

 Indeed, McKinsey found that companies that digitised for this world of the future, not only hired digitally-savvy persons, but also upskilled their staff to align with the goals of their transformations. Most companies also had “integrators” who served as bridges between the company’s traditional past and its digital future, integrating new digital processes into existing ways of working. 

3. Facilitating new ways of working

Digital transformations require cultural and behavioural changes in areas that include accelerated collaboration, calculated risk taking, continuous learning and open environment.  As McKinsey found, organisations that reported improvements in even one area, such as customer centricity or agile business processes, were more likely than competitors to report successful transformations. That was particularly so when stakeholders and employees were encouraged to contribute their own ideas on where digitisation could support the business.

4. Upgrading tools the workforce uses every day

Almost all organisations that reported success told McKinsey how upgrading their day-to-day tools contributed to structural change. Examples include streamlining repetitive tasks and paperless processes with automated processes such as automated emails, NDAs,  legal forms, documents, approvals and so forth across desktop, web and mobile. You can create and manage all aspects of your automations from a central portal, across stakeholders and on the go. Businesses that use AUTTO’s no-code automation platform report that it helps make information more accessible across their organisations, gives them more time to market and innovate, supercharges their services, and removes human error from their processes, among other benefits. British-based financial crime consultancy, FinTrail, for instance, said that AUTTO’s no-code solution helped triple its membership and reduced their workload by 75%.

5. Communicating via traditional and digital methods

Effective communication may well be one of the single most important factors when it comes to digital transformation. The same 2018 McKinsey report found that successful transformation was at least three times more likely when staff were fed a compelling change story that dramatised why digital transformation would generate profits. McKinsey’s survey also showed that managers influenced when they communicated with a sense of urgency, providing teams with clear roadmaps and accompanying metrics. 

Wrap-up

Digital transformation is one of the biggest risks your business will ever face – and one of the biggest opportunities. Over the past six years, it has mostly been the traditional companies like travel agency Thomas Cook, Revlon and retailer Arcadia Group that filed for bankruptcy. Those that embraced digital transformation – consider Vodafone, Shell, Bayer, and Audi – reported they made tremendous strides forward. Change is risky – but clinging to dated methods and processes almost certainly augurs disaster. 

Digital transformation is here to stay. Embrace it, and you will be rewarded with faster revenue growth,  customer loyalty and a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Using tools like AUTTO’s no-code automation platform is one step closer to becoming digital-first.  

With the rise of no-code platforms, we are seeing a shift in how organisations develop and use technology. Gone are the days where all IT infrastructure sits within the IT departments – we’re all technologists now and all have access to tools to make our day jobs easier. But what impact does this have on the business if it is not managed correctly?

Platforms such as AUTTO puts power at the fingertips of knowledge workers to help develop business solutions. They give organisations a quick and easy start to becoming digital-first and put the user in control.

No-code brings a shift in how technology is delivered to the business – and that means there are a number of risks if left unchecked. With governance and security the primary areas to focus on, the role of the CIO has to change and adapt to prevent a free for all, where IT activity becomes siloed and ad hoc. 

Get it right though, and no-code tools will be an enabler. Businesses don’t have to worry about having big teams of developers, they don’t have to worry about version control, because that is handled by the platforms themselves. The days are long past when almost any IT project required coding from scratch: slow, difficult to build and with painstaking testing and iteration.

Now, it’s possible to access a single tool with multiple functions and functionalities all from one central platform. Tools like AUTTO, help businesses automate repetitive tasks by digitising business processes through workflows – freeing up the one thing that is most important – time.

In short, through no-code, technology has become simple – it’s how you apply it that brings it to life.

Barriers of Adoption

While it solves many problems, no-code does raise other challenges – like how you fit it all together. A big part of the task is how you integrate these platforms with your existing legacy systems. You need to ringfence legacy so that you don’t break it. So finding a tool which allows you to connect to existing technology is key. 

What all of this means is that the skills needed have changed. It used to be about having lots of coders and developers. Now, it’s about how you fit everything together – so there’s a much higher need for enterprise and business solutions architects. It’s given rise to a new term as well – Citizen Developers.

It also opens a new doorway into technology careers for people who may have been put off by the highly technical nature of many tech roles. Apprenticeships and boot camp-style skills programmes, such as the PMI’s dedicated Citizen Developer certification program, can equip talented individuals with the tools they need to implement no-code solutions quickly, without compromising on responsible design and governance methods. 

Where does No-code sit within an Organisation?

In the past, the CIO or IT director would have focussed on overseeing complex multi-year projects. Now, the role is about overseeing more rapid iterative changes and governance – ensuring there is a clear framework for activity, that activity is coordinated, and that there is connectivity between applications.

A lack of control also introduces security risks. Given today’s alarmingly prevalent cyber threats, it has become simply imperative that strong and consistent security protocols, resilient infrastructure, and robust data protection and privacy processes are in place.

Meanwhile, it is Citizen Developers who are driving the business forward in terms of new capabilities, functionality and solutions. It is the role of the IT department to safeguard the way that business owners adopt new tooling, providing oversight and ensuring no-code development is safe and responsible.

The Future of No-code Solutions

The covid-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for change. This acceleration of digital transformation through no-code, the move to cloud and other major trends mean there is still much to do for IT teams in building a robust and safe digital enterprise.

General Counsels and in-house lawyers are under more pressure than ever before – with an increase in workload volume, a greater demand to deliver advice, manage risk and ensure legal compliance for the business, there’s very little time left to practise law. 

With the Legal sector being considered as Tech sceptics, is it time to start looking at ways to evolve through the digital revolution or risk getting left behind? 

On Thursday 23rd June a group of like-minded tech and legal professionals met online to discuss the drivers and barriers to adopting technology within the legal sector. 

The morning started with introductions from our partners, Off Road Legal and the conversation started by considering the normalisation of automation. 

Adverts are popping up on buses and on TV which is showing acceptance in white-collar industries; everyone is starting to understand that automation can help. “Obviously, factories and blue-collar industries adopted automation a while back, but recently there has been a shift to white-collar automation that is here to stay,” said Peter Impey, Co-Founder of Off Road Legal. 

This begs the question of why is automation not accelerating at the same speed within Legal as in other areas of white-collar work?

The Drivers of Change 

Ian Gosling, CEO of AUTTO, followed, “Over the last 10 years we have seen a big change within digital transformation in Law.  It has been driven by the rise of Legal Operations led by  CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium).  CLOC’s Core 12 framework gives us a good basis for looking at all the pieces you need to have in play to move towards having a modern digitally transformed legal function,  and how those pieces connect.  In my experience, for change to be successful people, process and technology need to align with the business model.”

The main driver for adopting technology is operational excellence.  Andrew Wingfield Co-Founder of Off Road Legal went on to explain “The client expects more and that is a major external driver for change.  Those demands are being met by new entrants to the legal market, the big four consultancies, technology-enabled competitors, and listed legal businesses all driving change.  How will law firms win in this situation, if they don’t innovate with technology?”

“Legal operations is a discipline, if you instil it in a legal team, whether they are private practice, inhouse or a legal operations team, it’s a mindset of understanding the importance of process, legal, data, and using technology to get the best results. The drivers behind adopting technology for law firms and legal functions within a business are completely different and I think that has to be recognised,” said Jeremy Hopkins, Legal Operations Specialist, Contentsquare.

Barriers to Adoption

When it comes to adopting new technologies within any organisation there are always barriers to change. People have tried introducing new tools before, for example, Contract Lifecycle management tools,  and failed.  This raises the question, do people fail around the tool instead of the tool failing? Have you ever used or been given access to a tool but you either didn’t know how to use it or chose not to use it and continued doing what you normally do?  Eventually, the tool takes the blame.  To successfully change the people, the process and the technology all need to be aligned to deliver.   This can be especially difficult to manage if the change is externally driven and not internally led.

The technology itself must align with the change. 

Overcoming the Barriers to Change 

The legal industry is traditionally conservative and often a late adopter of innovation.  How do law firms and legal professionals adapt to a more competitive and demanding environment?

Trying to get to the result fast using a big bang model of change is risky and a better approach is to implement smaller pieces of the overall digital process. “It’s all about incremental change – small changes that will lead to overall bigger changes and bigger impact for the business,” said Ian Gosling. 

One way to implement incremental change is the use of no-code tools which enable incremental change. These allow teams to adopt new ways of working that are low risk, low cost, and still show big results.  A no-code environment gives control of the change to the legal team, allowing them to own the transformation of their work.  This can help make digital and operational transformation internally-led, helping overcome barriers and concerns about technology and change.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this event and our Partners Off Road Legal. If you would like to find out more about how automation can help your business, request a free demo below and one of our automation experts will get in touch.