When you know where to look, you’ll find that digital disruption is all around you – and that’s it’s been responsible for many of the technology industry’s most sensational success stories in the last decade or two.
Take the shift from physical to digital media, for example. By offering movies and exclusive TV series through a subscription service, beamed directly into homes, Netflix both digitally disrupted and totally transformed the entertainment industry overnight.
The world of work is no stranger to digital disruption either. Take technologies like Zoom and Slack – they digitally disrupted remote work, and right when our society needed them most.
Is digital disruption just for big organisations with millions to invest? Not at all. You can take your digital transformation a step further and positively disrupt the market in your favour – just by learning the right approach.
What is digital disruption?
Simply put, digital disruption is when emergent new technologies and capabilities enter a given industry – and correlates to companies’ ability to not only move with the times according to their business needs, but also outpace innovation and become market leaders in and of themselves.
This makes the idea of digital disruption very appealing and one well worth including in any digital transformation strategy or ongoing modernisation effort.
For the unprepared, the digital disruption of their chosen industry can prove something of a sink or swim moment. Change is often uncomfortable, yet the correct strategy of adaptation and innovation through digitalisation can instead make this an invigorating time in which your organisation can flourish through digital acceleration.
The international health crisis and its aftermath has been exhausting yet has also proven how resilient and capable of shifting gears rapidly businesses can be when circumstances demand it.
In an era in which technology seems to move faster than ever, digital disruption has to form a core component of your growth tactics in the 2020s.
Benefits of Digital Disruption
The opportunity to remain contemporary and lock in customer loyalty is undoubtedly one of the most significant benefits of embracing digital disruption – yet other opportunities make this a must-have tactic too.
So, is digital disruption merely a reputational tool of sorts – something that you should do because everyone else is doing it? Not at all. As you work with digital disruption in more depth, you’ll discover there are pragmatic benefits that can be put to work in directly improving your day-to-day operations with corporate tools for your digital workflow.
Here are a few examples.
Lower your costs
Is there any business in operation today that would turn down the opportunity to make its daily operational expenses lower? In times as dicey as ours, any chance to safely and responsibly do so should be seized.
Digital disruption unlocks advantages that were once the remit of high-end industries and gives them to everyone at a significantly smaller sum. For example, your smartphone – it’s easy to forget that that one invention disrupted not only the telephone but also cameras, music, entertainment, and even the ability to navigate confidently.
Even the high-end handsets do all that for far less than it would cost to buy a device that does each of those tasks separately.
Greater receptiveness to customer demand
Digital disruption consistently finds ways in which the barriers of communication between businesses and their customers can be broken down.
Just a few short decades ago, any customer seeking your business would need to chance upon your advertisements in magazines, find you in the phone book or write to your address directly for complaints and correspondence.
Today, reviews, social media presence and direct communications between customers and your industry peers are made more accessible than ever. Digital disruption is streamlining these processes too – but also bringing that ease of communication in-house with organisation and coordination tools for businesses.
More effective use of resources and assets
Through digital disruption, companies can far more effectively measure their energy use, how active their equipment and vehicle fleets are, what factors contribute to downtimes or employee miscommunications in project collaborations, and more. Adopting agile workflows enables you to maximise resource levelling and resource utilisation to achieve your OKR and KPI goals and nurture a high performance culture to improve your work performance. Other tips for integrated project management include using the pareto distribution and having a weekly workplan or a project kick-off meeting.
Through the data brought on board by these digital disruption solutions, organisations can more effectively monitor the use cases of their company’s assets and equipment and more intelligently decide when and where to invest in necessary improvements.
At its peak, you can use data to predict and analyse when a given piece of equipment is likely to show its age and proactively organise repairs and replacements accordingly – and it’s a similar story for software upgrades and enhanced cybersecurity.
Best practices for effectively overcoming digital disruption
Welcoming the change
Digital disruption, by its very nature, often can send your original plans awry. The key to making digital disruption work for you is not only to let that happen but remain open-minded to the changes being offered. For example, having a digital transformation roadmap or cloud strategy is essential to meet these changes head-on and work smarter.
Meet customers’ expectations
Digital disruption overhauls customers’ expectations of your industry – and if you are not offering the advantages of whatever the latest technology is, they’re likely to start shopping around with your competitors.
Budget accordingly
Investing in ways to stay on top of whatever changes digital disruption brings your business can be capital intensive. Set aside a budget to soak the hit of these investments, and coordinate the prices you pass to your customers to remain competitive.
Avoid information silos
Leaders investing in digital disruption tactics often send specialist teams away to helm the projects – but don’t lose touch with these free spirits, or you might well lose touch with the project objectives in your project pipeline in the first place.
Assume success
Businesses need to employ a sense of confidence to make the most of digital disruption. Focus not on how uncomfortable the changes being wrought are but how amazing your company will look when you’ve mastered them.
Digitalise your workflow with Tessaract
Digital disruption moves fast and can feel intimidating, yet it can be conquered and put to work for you with surprising ease once you’re on top of what’s what.
Part of that means making sure your team has the best workflow systems on their side and reducing redundancy with repetitive tasks. Tessaract's business management software is a low code and cloud-native workflow automation solution designed to enhance nimbleness, innovation and communication in the areas your team need them most, such as automated client onboarding forms, digital signing or document management workflows. Request a demo today to power your business with Tessaract.
