Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO, Builder.AI, which makes apps and websites, says that one of the trends today is that almost every business needs software to stay relevant and more and more traditional businesses are becoming digitally native.
While this is not an unfamiliar story, there is one question that everyone is asking: How much time does the digital transformation of a company take?
Satyamohan Yanambaka, CEO, Writer Information, which provides digitisation of services for enterprises, says that it takes 12-18 months for a mid-tier (with 500-1,000 employees) company’s digital transformation.
“Once the concept is finalised, once we know what the strategy is, it can take between 12 and 18 months for the implementation. In 18 months, you will get a minimum viable enterprise transformation done in terms of rollout,” he says. It might take another 18-36 months to yield actual results.
If it is a company that is human resource-dependent, then the extent of digital transformation will be limited. But for hybrid operation companies, the scope would be higher, Yanambaka says. “The second aspect would be the commitment of the company and its top executives. For any enterprise, 70% will depend on how committed these sponsors are for the digital transformation,” he says.
However, for a micro SME like a single-store outlet or a small restaurant, Duggal explains that the process can be done in a month. “It’s a day or two of getting the software inside, maybe a week at max. Then, from there, about three weeks of learning how to be digitally native,” he says. Talking about the need for handholding for these digital transformations, Duggal says that small businesses do not need to upskill as much as it needs to do cross-skilling, which means they do not need to suddenly become software developers but simply learn to run their business across a new medium. “Like uploading the inventory not into a book but into a software system, which I believe will take micro SMEs about a month and a small-to-medium business with some 100 people about six months. Bigger companies can take from one to two years,” he says.
Digital transformation is not always easy for traditional businesses. One of the primary challenges Yanambaka says is understanding what the client wants. They often don’t know it themselves, he says.
Yanambaka resorts to using various templates to understand the kind of digital transformation a company needs. “You roll out X percentage, get it tested on a pilot basis, make amends to that, tweak it depending upon the user experience and user feedback and come to a state where it reaches, you know, 80-90% acceptance level. Then you go live. So the biggest challenge is definitely that interchange of what customers want and what we understand what customers need,” he says.
The average customer is not technical and so there is a behavioral issue among SME clients, says Duggal. There is fear of failure as they do not understand the transformation completely.
“Building a software has required such a huge amount of contextual knowledge that it scares people. So, how do you get people over this fear? You get them excited. Try giving visual proofs so that it just doesn’t exist in intellect but also in experience. We ask them five or six really pertinent questions about the transformation and their needs, and then we start filling in the gap,” he says, adding that you need to take people through a journey during digital transformation so that they understand its advantages and relevance.
