My career as a Business Analyst has allowed me to participate in numerous digital transformation initiatives across a variety of industries. While digital transformation can be an exceptional value-add to an organization, I would like to take time and re-focus on why it is valuable.

Though digital transformation projects can take a tremendous amount of effort to implement, it can also yield numerous opportunities for operational excellence. Proper digital transformation focuses on increasing efficiencies to existing business processes (often creating new processes to support the solution), alleviating the burden of tedious and non-scalable manual tasks, increasing employee productivity, and strengthening corporate culture.

Previously, I worked with a client who expressed a desire for a soon-to-be-implemented document management system to be fully autonomous. The client emphasized that the system should perform without any “people supporting it”. This presented an immediate challenge as not only did we need people to use and support the system, we wanted people to be excited about maintaining it! Maintenance on any system requires effort and yet, is a worthwhile investment. It helps ensure that the system is trustworthy with reliable and current information.

After multiple conversations, the source of the client’s anxiety became clear. Given their current technology, only two employees were supporting the system for the whole organization, on top of their day-to-day work! The heavy burden of this workload led to a devaluation of the system through improper maintenance of documents. Documents were out of date, duplicated, difficult to find, and untrustworthy to the audience that needed them most. After analyzing the current processes in place, I decided that we needed to leverage digital transformation to empower more employees to create, support, and maintain their own departmental documentation.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty details of the actual implementation, but instead I want to shift focus on the value of digital transformation. In understanding the clients’ needs, leveraging digital transformation to optimize the document management lifecycle ensured that more employees were empowered, excited, and involved about maintaining their own department’s documentation. The creation of new business processes led to new roles and responsibilities to help support and maintain the solution. Corporate culture was strengthened through the empowerment of new roles and fostering collaboration between document managers and content creators to ensure documents shared were trustworthy, reliable and updated in a timely fashion.

Digital transformation should ultimately enable an organization to thrive efficiently and empower their employees to be productive by focusing on high value deliverables. It is not meant to replace existing employees. People need organizations, as much as organizations need people to survive.