What is Digital Enablement and Why Does It Matter?
By Umar Akhtar
What does the future of your industry or market look like? Modern brands can’t only think about the present when planning their digital strategies and must instead consider what could happen in the future.
That’s why companies must select the right technology solutions that allow them to digitally transform, create more efficient processes, and future-proof their businesses. According to McKinsey, nine out of ten C-suite level executives say that their organizations have pursued a digital transformation over the last two years. However, not every company has seen the results they’re looking for.
So, what’s the missing link? Digital enablement.
In this article, we’ll explain what digital enablement is, how it differs from digital transformation, and how Content Bloom supports our clients in achieving it.
What is Digital Enablement?
Digital enablement is the set of tools and processes supplied to an organization to help ensure a successful digital transformation. It is meant to align leadership on the strategic goals that improve a business and equip an organization to successfully adapt once digitization is complete.
Enablement also transforms processes so that they support digital endeavors rather than simply digitizing content or adding new tools. It requires companies to get buy-in from stakeholders and create onboarding processes that allow teams to adapt. It also entails aligning the entire organization around a vision and providing the training necessary to leverage new technologies and initiatives as they become available.
Businesses must also create the right communication strategy so that the adoption of new technologies occurs faster. Through digital enablement, this communication allows the people who are part of an organization to adopt the right behaviors to ensure digitalization success.
Digital Transformation vs. Digital Enablement
Digital enablement is often confused with digital transformation. To understand why we first need to understand what transformation entails. Gartner provides a helpful definition:
“Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. The term is widely used in public-sector organizations to refer to modest initiatives such as putting services online or legacy modernization.”
Whereas digital transformation is centered around modernizing and change, enablement provides the foundation to ensure the transformation is possible and successful. The combination of digital transformation and digital enablement helps organizations to become future-proof. By adopting best-of-breed technologies and the right behaviors, organizations can gain valuable solutions today and be adaptable as things evolve.
The Need for Digital Enablement and Future-Proof Technology
Businesses that fail to transform digitally can fall behind the competition sooner rather than later. A lack of digital innovation puts enormous pressure on a company as customers instead opt for those businesses that can provide them with the experiences they want with speed and precision. Hence, digital enablement and future-proof technologies are required. Some of the benefits include:
Strategic Alignment
Digital enablement ensures that any transformation strategy is aligned with the wider company vision and other strategic initiatives. Rather than simply buying and implementing a new piece of technology because it’s the hottest thing on the market, digital enablement ensures that it’s the right piece of technology that helps a brand achieve its goals.
Increased Flexibility and Adaptability
Customer interests can sometimes feel fickle, and market conditions can be somewhat unpredictable. To cope with uncertainty, businesses need digital enablement. It allows them to be adaptable enough to respond to changes in the digital environment and flexible enough to adjust strategies and goals to meet new requirements.
More Efficiency
Digital enablement makes your business more efficient and productive. It ensures that processes are set up so that roadblocks don’t delay team members and that workflows are appropriately defined. This ensures that even when incorporating new systems, teams know where content or data needs to go, who needs to see it before approval, and when it needs to be completed, thus streamlining communication throughout the organization.
Reduced Vendor Lock-In
One of the drawbacks of the digital landscape is that some companies can find themselves locked into working with a specific vendor due to financial commitments or the makeup of their tech stacks. Digital enablement helps organizations to select the right future-proof technology to reduce the likelihood of being locked into a difficult situation.
Move to Modularity
Forward-thinking businesses today are no longer looking for a one-size-fits-all solution to their problems. Instead, many have recognized the need for more freedom and the need to have best-of-breed solutions that can be swapped out accordingly. Opting for future-proof technologies allows businesses to not only cope with their current challenges today but be free to choose other software solutions if a change is needed.
Improved Customer Experience
Every business’s goal is to deliver exactly what the customer wants. Digital enablement can make that a reality by ensuring teams can operate more efficiently to provide seamless and engaging experiences that delight the customer.
How Content Bloom Enables Your Future Business
Between growing digital trends and a wealth of data, brands can sometimes feel overwhelmed with whether or not they’re choosing the right set of technologies to achieve their digital transformation, secure their future, and leave legacy platforms behind. However, what matters more is whether organizational culture, strategy, and leadership are in alignment.
Content Bloom is an enterprise digital consultancy with expertise in tools that allow you to deliver on any digital enablement goals. Our vast range of services and customized processes provide what you need to future-proof your business.
Our headless technology and content management expertise can help you launch digital experiences and adapt to changing customer demands with the help of cutting-edge technology. We also provide managed services, CMS migrations, custom development, and more to help you solve several different business problems.
However, as we’ve emphasized, digital enablement isn’t just about the technology and how your people and processes are incorporated. Our discovery process and analysis workshops enable us to understand the steps we need to take and how it fits into the bigger picture. Our design workshops help define how we plan to solve the problem and how potential solutions align with your overall goals.
Ready to begin your digital enablement process? Reach out to see how we can help.
FAQ
Why is digital enablement important?
Digital enablement helps to guarantee a successful digital transformation. It ensures that a business implements technology that aligns with its overall strategy increases the efficiency and productivity of employees, and leads to an improved customer experience.
What does it mean to be future-proof?
Future-proof means designing a product so that it can be changed or adapted to be useful now and in the future.
What is future-proof infrastructure?
Future-proof infrastructure refers to a collection of technologies that allow organizations to adapt and withstand changes to changing customer demands and business requirements.
Get the latest industry news, articles, and updates.
(No junk. Just the good stuff.)
Related posts
7 Ways Retail Business Intelligence is Changing Ecommerce
Retail is an intensely competitive market and, without Business Intelligence (BI), you risk operating blindly in the dark.
Business Intelligence for Banking: 9 Ways BI Can Help BFSIs
Business intelligence is rapidly changing the way banks and financial services organizations operate.
How a Poor Data Ingestion Process Negatively Impacts Business
What does a good ingestion pipeline look like and why does it matter?
