Digital Transformation: An Irreversible Trend for Businesses
Digital transformation for businesses is a global trend that everyone are striving to get involved. SMEs are no exception to it as failure to implement it early can find themselves being outsmarted by competitors or even shunned out of the market. Digital transformation is not just about raising productivity and reducing human errors. More importantly, it can free up valuable human resources for high value-added economic activities and create better customer experience and higher participation. All these can help businesses generate new revenues to boost their overall income.
In Hong Kong, renowned as a free, well-connected and competitive economy with robust ICT infrastructure, companies are starting to embrace digital transformation. According to the “Research on Digital Transformation in Hong Kong Business Sector” released by the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) in 2019, many local companies believed digitalisation to be an important strategy, with switching hardcopies of documents to digital format being the first step of digital transformation. Also, most of those surveyed expects digital transformation to save costs and improve business processes, solving issues like rigid internal approval process, lack of systematic management in the work process, and non-interoperability of internal data.
Not long after the Report was released came the global explosion of the COVID-19 outbreak. To maintain social distancing, businesses have adopted various technologies for remote work to ensure normal operation. This has made more of them to become aware of the importance and urgency of engaging in digital transformation and building a smart city, and advance their awareness in using information technologies to maintain productivity in difficult times. In turn, they can seriously consider to further digitalise their processes and practices to enhance resilience and competitiveness in the long-term.
Once businesses start adopting various technologies to enhance operational efficiency, digital transformation becomes an imperative and irreversible trend. They will also continue to explore what should be the step of this journey in order to maximise the returns, for example, creating a new business model to generate new revenue to increase overall turnover.
However, many SMEs mistakenly believe that digital transformation has an established model or requires huge amounts of money to implement it. As each enterprise has a different starting point and ultimate goal in their digital transformation journey, they must take into account their own circumstances and future development to formulate a digital transformation roadmap that suit their pace. Hence, their level of investment on the task will be different. Businesses should not look at digital transformation merely from the point of view of cost recovery or return on investment, but also need to think about value creation.
As seen from the above, the mindset of the business owners and management plays a very important role in leading the company to implement digital transformation. They need to have the will and readiness to be both fail-fast and dare to try/fail. For example, even the company has already adopted digital system, the management will still request employees to print out all the emails and e-approval requests. It seems difficult to accomplish digital transformation and also leaves employees confused.
Companies should adopt a top-down leadership approach and formulate a comprehensive strategy, followed by building two-way communication for staff to participate in the process. Then they should plan for digital transformation according to their own pace of intelligentisation and use six critical technologies (sensor, Internet, data, human machine interface, artificial intelligence and robotics) to drive forth digitalisation in industry. Also, intelligent operation and management can offer personalised products and services of higher quality to customers, enabling operating efficiency and seizing of new business opportunities. Moreover, companies must refrain from acting rashly and adopt a gradual approach during implementation. In addition, they need to make good use of available resources to train up sufficient staff with the relevant operating skills.
HKPC will offer one-stop consultancy services for SMEs interested in digital transformation. These include the formulation of a digital transformation blueprint and capital planning such as investment estimation and finding the matching government funding. Also, it can provide system integration or development services and arrange company staff to receive training related to the application. More recently, it organises webinars to explore the means on effective implementation of smart digitised workplace, online marketing/e-commerce etc., to enhance the operating knowhow in digital business.
At the same time, cyber security protection measures play an important role during digital transformation. Through the Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre, HKPC issues security guidelines and advice and hosts and attends webinars and training workshops. It also publishes a series of security research reports for the Internet of Things devices to assist local industry in enhancing cyber security in digital transformation.
Acknowledgement : Hong Kong Productivity Council
