A Complete Digital Transformation Framework

Written by Timothy Ware

The economy has been changing rapidly since the early days of the Internet. While the rate of change has only accelerated, that’s been especially true since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A digital transformation framework can help you keep up.

A digital transformation framework is a way to visually model your digital transformation plans. This helps get stakeholder buy-in, which is a key component of any successful digital transformation.

Digital transformation (DX) provides a number of benefits to your organization, regardless of whether you are just starting the process or looking for the next big DX win.

To see how SignTime fits into your digital transformation framework, sign up for a free trial today.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation is simply using new technologies to improve the efficiency of your business. There are two related terms: digital transformation roadmap and digital transformation framework. 

A digital transformation roadmap is an organized approach to a digital transformation. It begins with data collection and ends with a review of the results and considering next steps. 

One of the biggest hurdles in digital transformation is organizational buy-in. This includes leadership understanding the value of digital transformation, as well as employees being willing to learn new processes and engage with new tools.

In both cases, a digital transformation framework can help.

If you would like to learn more about digital transformation, here are some benefits of DX: 20 Digital Transformation Benefits

What is a digital transformation framework?

The goal of a digital transformation framework is to provide an understandable visualization of your roadmap. By creating an understandable framework, it is easier to get stakeholder buy-in to any digital transformation roadmap.

This way, senior management is better able to understand the return on investment (ROI) of each step of the digital transformation and how each part creates synergies with the others. 

For example, many companies sign up for SignTime to speed up their sales funnel. However, the cloud content repository can have added benefits in reducing real estate costs associated with storing many documents. 

Ultimately, SignTime brings benefits to every department.

What are the five many parts of a successful digital transformation framework?

A digital transformation framework is all about visualizing the need, method, and results of a digital transformation. Since different stakeholders will have different relationships with the process, you might need more than one digital transformation framework. 

That’s why several digital transformation frameworks are shared below. However, there are five key ingredients that can help your digital transformation succeed:

1. Digital culture
2. Stakeholder engagement
3. Process and innovation
4. Technology introduction
5. Data collection and analysis

Digital culture

If a culture of change doesn’t exist in an organization, then it is not going to succeed with a digital transformation. The company needs to be ready to take risks, onboard new technologies, and see what happens. 

All of this is part of a digital culture. Another important part of a digital culture is an interest in learning. Your staff and leadership need to be willing to learn new ways of conducting business. That includes learning how to use new tools. 

Thankfully, many companies focus on user experience and ease of use when building tools in support of digital transformation. This includes SignTime.

To see how easy it is to integrate SignTime into your business processes, sign up for a free trial today.

Stakeholder engagement

Successful digital transformation requires the support of three main groups of stakeholders:

• Leadership
• Staff
• Customers

A well-formulated digital transformation framework can help with this.

Leadership

It’s important to bring leadership into the digital transformation process early. While individual teams often have the freedom to onboard new tools, without a company-wide transition the full benefits of a digital transformation will not be attained.

To get upper management buy-in to digital transformation, present them with the hard data on what is currently deficient and how digital transformation can help. 

Staff

Ultimately, it is the employees who will be using new tools and following new procedures. It’s also not unusual for the reasons behind new procedures to be unclear to those who need to follow them. 

For example, new cybersecurity procedures could lead to more work in the short term, but, to upper management, it is a risk reduction strategy that will lead to lower costs and a better value proposition in the future. If your employees don’t appreciate this macro view, they may be less inclined to follow any new rules.

Customers

Especially in the world of software as a service (SaaS), customer success is a key department. However, one-on-one coaching with customer success managers (CSMs) can be less scalable. 

This leads companies to slowly push their customer success functions to emails, live chats, interactive lessons, and guides. If your customers aren’t interested in these digital transformation plans, then you won’t see the advantages of such functions.

Process and innovation

Once you have stakeholder buy-in and a culture of change, you can start to look towards innovation. This is where you find the processes that need to be updated and how they can be improved. 

Technology introduction

Digital transformation by its very definition is dependent on new technologies. However, many of these tools are expensive and their benefits are marginal. It’s important to match the introduction of technology to specific processes so that you gain the expected efficiencies from the process.

Data collection and analysis

While data collection and analysis is the last item mentioned in this digital transformation framework, that doesn’t mean it is the least important, nor that it is performed at the end. 

Data should be collected and analyzed during the entire digital transformation process. Start by using data to understand your current business processes and to find any inefficiencies. Then, research possible changes and the tools that can support those changes. Finally, analyze the processes after changes have been implemented to confirm that the expected results have been obtained.

Digital transformation framework examples

Ionology offers multiple example digital transformation framework examples: 

• Emerging technology digital transformation framework 
• Digital transformation in practice digital transformation framework
• The 5 change block digital transformation framework
• Block equation digital transformation framework
• The 7 principles of digital business strategy digital transformation framework

SignTime should be part of your digital transformation

SignTime offers all of the tools you need to digitize your contracting processes. Create templates, send them to one or a thousand people at once, and then store them securely in the cloud forever.  

E-signatures are an easy first step to digital transformation. As a non-disruptive technology, e-signatures don’t require a large consulting project to start. 

In addition, SignTime supports Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word in addition to PDF, has an easy to implement SaaS model, and you can send e-signature requests via email or SMS.