Digital Transformation Roadmap - How to Get your Team on Board

What is a digital transformation roadmap?

A digital transformation roadmap provides a clear, focused, measurable plan to move from your existing digital processes to your future digital strategy. It includes setting goals and understanding the gaps between your current systems and strategy. 

Digital transformation is a business-wide initiative that is as much about transforming culture and processes as it is about technology. Digital transformation is a journey. Read on to discover how to create a digital transformation roadmap.

What are the key components of a digital transformation roadmap?

All companies aiming to kickstart their digital transformation should create a roadmap. Technology is advancing at such a pace that all companies will need to undergo a digital transformation at some stage or face extinction. In fact, digital transformation can help SMBs thrive. DocuSign commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey 1,087 global decision-makers in The State of Systems of Agreement Survey 2021. The survey found that organisations that are further along in digitising their contract lifecycle experience more benefits and outperform lower-maturity competitors. Automated processes decrease costs and increase the speed of completion. When you create a digital roadmap, there are some key elements to include:

1. Assess your current capabilities and technology - audit your existing assets, business systems and digital processes. 
2. Consider also people - your customers, employees and leadership capabilities. 
3. Set KPIs and Milestones
4. Identify Priorities - it helps to identify options for quick wins where you can prove ROI quickly. 
5. Create a Change Management Plan, ensuring the roadmap is a priority for all key stakeholders and that the changes are communicated effectively. 
6. Document your transformation roadmap and build the relevant team.

How to Create a Successful Digital Transformation Roadmap

A successful digital transformation requires change management, and the entire team needs to support the vision. Start by defining and agreeing on clear business objectives with achievable milestones and checkpoints for assessing progress. Here are three things you should do to get your team on board with digital transformation:  

Communication Strategy 

The first stage of creating a digital transformation framework is to do a comprehensive analysis of the business to understand the requirements and potential outcomes. Define the value each change will bring to each business unit affected. Then, build a communication strategy to address the pain points at a department level as well as the wider business goals. Digital business transformation is almost twice as likely to succeed if there is clear communication of the timeline of implementing digital initiatives.  

Building Your Team 

“Land and expand” is by far the best way to achieve company-wide digital transformation. Or rather, in this case, building a team within the business to be the early adopters and help drive the vision. They can support the project, deliver results early on, and then bring others on board.

1. Executive sponsor(s): Your 'Executive sponsor(s)' will not only need to support the vision financially but should also help communicate the plan and progress downstream.
2. The adoption champion(s): identify change management champions from across the business who will help drive the project and identify bottlenecks. Be mindful that the champions need to see their role as an opportunity instead of the additional workload. Depending on the size and complexity of your business, you should ideally have one champion for every 20 impacted end users, broken down by team.

Likely, it won’t all be plain sailing from here. Preparing for resistance is equally as crucial as identifying adoption champions, says innovation expert Greg Satell: “Much as any competitive strategy that doesn’t anticipate the response from competitors is doomed to failure, any digital transformation strategy that doesn’t consider those who oppose change is unlikely to succeed.”

Digital Transformation Success 

Understanding the value of your Digital Transformation investment is imperative. Define what success means to you. Gartner warns of over-engineering digital transformation measurement. You don’t need to measure everything - just focus on what is essential. Paul Proctor, VP Analyst at Gartner, says:  “Choose KPIs that you can measure easily. Don’t try to build a KPI hierarchy. Select just 5 to 9 metrics to track, report and act on. The value of a metric lies in its ability to influence business decision making.” While we all know how vital measuring digital transformation success is, an often overlooked element is circulating success. New BCG Research says digital transformation success is rare, but companies that get six factors right, including a clear, integrated strategy and commitment and communication from the top down, can flip the odds of success from 30% to 80%. People are inherently resistant to change, but the more value your transformation can deliver, the greater the support it will receive. 

In Conclusion 

While digital disruption creates new opportunities in all companies, agile, smaller companies can use digital workflow to give them the power to move faster and see results more quickly. The trick is to design good processes early on and implement digital automation and technologies that help make those processes more scalable.  The ‘people’ side of digital transformation can be a harder nut to crack. The fastest way to get the team bought into the vision is through demonstrating success. Search for low-hanging fruit, like DocuSign eSignature, which can be deployed within a week. The benefits can be realised instantly, and it is a great way to encourage wider adoption. Business agreements are an area where you can accelerate digital transformation. Many small businesses embrace digital transformation with help from companies like Google, Intuit and DocuSign. An Ernst and Young Survey found that legal teams that digitise routine tasks could save up to 20% of their team’s time. Cloud-enabled contract management can digitise routine tasks using contract lifecycle technology like DocuSign CLM or DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce.

“The quicker you can get rid of the processes that are slowing you down, the faster you can get to outcomes,” Aragon Research CEO Jim Lundy.  To learn more about organisations that are undergoing digital transformation and customer experience transformation, download the Forrester report, The State of Systems Agreement 2021. You’ll learn how leading organisations are making a move toward automated processes to prepare, sign, act on and manage their agreements.