An Entrepreneur’s Guide on Outsourcing Digital Transformation

Irrespective of which industry you pick, the talks around digital transformation and its benefits are unanimously chanted. Although the offerings don’t fall short on its promises, every brand – big and small that has worked towards the efforts of digital transformation knows that it is easier said than done. 

Even the transformation strategies that are laid down by best in class plans tend to lean towards disaster when not implemented rightly. According to a Genpact research, businesses have wasted over $400 billions a year simply on misguided digital transformation efforts. 

Digital transformation is not just about using technologies to make business tackle specific customer needs. It is about creating an interconnected ecosystem where the work that is done company wide is transformed for the better. Achieving this, can be a very daunting task for the in-house IT teams whose resources are consumed by tasks aimed at business continuity or are simply unskilled to take such an undertaking that affects not just the business’s bottom line but the entire culture. 

This difficulty is what leads to the process of outsourcing digital transformation. 

Table of Content

1. Challenges that make it difficult for businesses to perform digital transformation in-house
2. Why are companies choosing to outsource their digital transformation projects
3. Opportunities you can embrace by the incorporation of digital transformation in business
4. Which are the most common elements of digital transformation outsourcing
5. Benefits of business transformation outsourcing
6. The digital transformation roadmap Appinventiv follows

According to Accenture research, 90% companies take assistance from a third-party solution provider to help them with at least one element of business digitization. But before you delve into the reasonings that make it a good decision to outsource digital transformation framework, let us first peek into the challenges that make it difficult to cover the process in-house. 

Challenges that make it difficult for businesses to perform digital transformation in-house 

• Presence of a non-digital organization culture 
• Absence of digital skillset 
• Inherent limitations of the Agile Transformation process
• Lack of a security-first digital transformation approach
• Hard to let go legacy architecture

These challenges are the reason behind the Genpact’s research findings we read earlier in the blog. To solve them and to apply digital transformation in business with zero chances of erroneous outcomes, businesses have now started out inclining towards digital transformation outsourcing. 

Why are companies choosing to outsource their digital transformation projects

Enterprises generally outsource software development services for business digitization projects for providing enhanced, advanced and more digitally-backed user experiences – the end goal of every digital transformation process. Outsourcing makes this possible by offering the service in a cost and time efficient manner, liberating businesses from the overhead costs.

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Besides these reasons, companies are also outsourcing digital transformation solutions and leveraging expertise of reputable IT consulting firm to gather the many opportunities that the digital transformation framework comes with – ones that they will not be able to get if restricted to their in-house IT team. 

Opportunities you can embrace by the incorporation of digital transformation in business

• Use the capabilities of Big Data analytics, data science, and Business Intelligence for delivering bespoke user experience, find new market trends, and even develop new services and products.
• Use IoT for leveling up data collection, efficiency, and fostering predictive modeling.
• Using AR/VR for creating engaging customer experience.
• Automation and digitization of process for reducing costs, increasing performance, and enabling people to focus on R&D instead of low outcome tasks. 
• Workforce virtualization and connectivity with the universally dispersed specialists.
• Use APIs for enhancing flexibility, connecting with other platforms, and shaping a better user interaction.
• Using AI to assist people in better decision making and finding answers to complex issues. 

Up until this point, we have highlighted enough on the growing importance of digitizing your business. With that well attended, let us look into the elements of the digital transformation solutions that businesses are outsourcing. 

[Also Read: How is digital transformation advancing the future of the ecommerce industry?]

Which are the most common elements of digital transformation outsourcing 

To undertake the digitization of business transformation, companies first have to realize and finalize the elements that must be outsourced to the digital transformation strategy consulting firm. Here are the top of them:

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Benefits of business transformation outsourcing

1.  Access to skilled resources 

Outsourcing digital transformation gives you access to skilled resources who are an expert in their field. Moreover, it gives you the flexibility to choose the number of resources. You can either employ someone with a specific technical expertise or hire a  dedicated development team who would be completely committed to your project. 

Additionally, outsourcing helps with finding and building a team of skilled specialists with very less effort and in a short timeframe. 

2.  A first-hand experience in multiple verticals

When you partner with a digital transformation company like Appinventiv, you get to work with an agency that has experience in healthcare digitalization, fintech, energy, manufacturing, entertainment, insurtech. Partnering with such an agency would help bring greater value to the table. 

3.  Mitigation of risk

Being a daunting task for the new entrepreneurs, digital transformation is something that agencies have used to perform from the time of their inception. They have a complete understanding of the challenges which can emerge and how to overcome them proactively. Outsourcing the process to a digitalization consulting firm that understands your business needs would not only save money but also help reduce or rather eliminate the risks along the way. 

4.  Cost-effective integration of Data Science as a Service 

One of the important outcomes of a digital transformation effort is the capability of leveraging Business Intelligence and Big Data opportunities for business growth. Drawing the benefits of  data science helps businesses deliver customized user experiences, create innovative products, and find out new business markets and trends.

The time and cost however, calls for developing an in-house data analytics center which can add up very fast. Moreover, businesses would have to employ data science experts for whom they would have to pay big bucks. On the other hand, outsourcing the data science experts can help the businesses with customized data processing models, data-driven decisions, and turning of gathered data into graphics, insights, and visuals.

5.  Greater security 

When you outsource the digital transformation efforts, you can be sure of the fact that they would have the best security practices in place for protecting businesses from risks like cybercrime. Additionally, digitization of certain assets could become problematic if you rely only on in-house security. This is the next domain where the outsourced expertise offers great business value to the organizations who launch such projects.

The digital transformation roadmap Appinventiv follows

Building a digital transformation roadmap is the base of every successful project. The approach enables designing and management of transformation initiative while lowering the attached risks. What makes us a trusted name in the digital transformation industry is the fact that we build a roadmap that guarantees digital outsource success. 

Our roadmap generally begins with the assessment of present digital strategy and then defining the future goals. On the basis of these information, we create our three elements digital roadmap –

People – Our 360 digital transformation consulting starts with creating an awareness within the company that digital transformation aids customer experience only through a customer-centric mindset in the company. We help companies rethink their role as business leaders and help them improve the process of cross-functional collaborations. 

Process – In this element, our focus is entirely on maximizing the organizational efficiency and ensuring that the new business model is scalable. An important part of ensuring scalability is carrying our customer lifecycle analysis and building a customer journey map, highlighting how the customers engage with the business. 

Technology – The focus of this third pillar is on developing an integrated information infra which would become the base of data integration. The strategy focuses on both software, hardware, and information science at same time. 

We also help develop a contextualized architecture which enables structuring of data and enablement of predictive data analytics that help push growth. 

Businesses, before deciding to outsource their digital transformation project must know that this is not a one-time process. There will always be new digital transformation practice that they would have to follow driven by the fact that the customer experiences are also constantly changing. While we work as our clients’ extended team, we advise you to check with your agency on how they would like to take care of the long term processes.

THE AUTHOR

Saurabh Singh

CEO & Director