3 steps to get the most from your digital transformation

While company leaders know they need new technologies to remain relevant and grow, implementing such a change can be daunting. At Docusign, we face a lot of “how” questions as customers look to successfully create a digital transformation within their organization—questions like, “That solution will save us time, but how do I get my team to adopt it?” or “How will we find the time and buy-in to implement such a huge change?”

Digital transformation is a complex task. To make it more manageable, we have broken it down into three phases: Implement, Optimize, and Grow. Breaking down your digital transformation into a series of smaller processes can help answer those “how” questions.

The three phases to digital transformation

Within each of the three phases in this framework, you’ll find some ways to visualize and implement an efficient and effective transformation.

Implement: Set the vision

How you set up your company’s initial implementation will impact its expansion. Implementing technology in one area of your business is the most focused (and practical) way to get started. Starting off simply with one use case will also make it easier to establish best practices and workflows that can be adapted as you get feedback from users.

As you are launching your initial implementation, it is always important to get feedback, but also to get your colleagues excited about using a new technology. You can do that in multiple ways, such as sharing what the value and ROI will be over time or how the transformation makes their jobs—and lives—easier and more efficient. 

Additionally, building a governance model that ensures a unified strategy and usage guidelines will help you create a Center of Excellence that can sustain your enablement throughout multiple use cases. Creating a realistic and attainable vision will be the core of your company’s success.  

Optimize: Get centralized

Once you’ve seen success in one area of your business, the next step may be to look at expanding into other areas. This can be exciting as you imagine all the possibilities, but it’s good to remember that as multiple use cases go live, the adoption process can become disjointed and disorganized. Not every implementation will go exactly as planned. But with a little preparation and foresight, you can work through even the toughest roadblock. 

In this phase, the goal is to get each use case operating with a vision for centralization ahead. All your work creating governance models, training content, and best practices will culminate in an enterprise-wide Center of Excellence that powers the final stage of transformation.

Centralizing is mostly about self-reliance, scale, and speed as you expand your implementation. There is no specific rule for when you should shift to a centralized model with a Center of Excellence, but it often happens after about three departments are up and running. 

Grow: Make digital transformation a core competency

So, what does a Center of Excellence actually do? Short answer: a Center of Excellence is a development plan that will help you streamline your enterprise-wide rollout of Docusign. By helping you establish a governance model and enablement strategies that can be implemented across multiple use cases, your Center of Excellence makes tracking your progress easy. 

Before creating your Center of Excellence, though, you will need to do a few preliminary steps to make sure that you’re addressing your company’s initial needs. Doing this will help you adapt to any changes or hiccups you may run into along your different implementations:

• Identify executive sponsorship

• Host on-site workshops

• Create a funding model

• Write a transition plan

• Launch the Center of Excellence

Once the critical pieces are in place—e.g.,  several thriving departments, multiple executive sponsors, a thorough base of training content and best practices, and, hopefully, a strong desire from other departments to get on board—you’re ready to establish a Center of Excellence to drive enterprise-wide adoption and make digital transformation a core value within your company.

Mobilizing for the future

Technology can be leveraged to help companies like yours shape its future, creating new or improved experiences for your customers and employees, while also driving growth, innovation, and revenue. But it’s good to keep in mind that digital transformation is not an end state—it’s an ongoing process that requires rethinking business processes and applying adaptive, intuitive technology to make them possible. 

To learn more, download our white paper—The definitive framework for successful digital transformation—for more on how you can optimize your digital transformation.