A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
NH Hotel Group
Digital transformation
Nowadays, everybody is talking about digital transformation, how covid has accelerated its implementation and, moreover, how it has accelerated its adoption by clients and employees. Things that would have taken us 4 or 5 years to adopt before, have gainedmassive use in less than 1 year.
But what is it?
Literally, it means implementing technology, tools and digital resources to automate, innovate and optimizetasks. Digitalization helps companies to achieve their main objectives: increase revenues, reduce costs, reduce emissions (sustainability) and retain talent.
But these systems and tools are only the enablers that will help us in that journey (automations and robotics, AI and machine learning, cloud, SaaS software, collaboration tools, IoT…) andthey are not enough to have success. It is not just a matter of implementing new tools because now it is cool, and we should have it, nor is it only a matter of IT departments.
A successful digital transformation implies a change of mindsetand culture and must be supported by a profound and global strategy. We should basically ask ourselves:why should we do it? For whom and for what?
You should define your aims and also understand the market,company, clients and employee maturity to adopt the different options. Here some of them:
-Improve customer experience during all theircustomer journey. In the hospitality sector, this encompasses from the moment they decide to book in one of our hotels, to their prearrival, arrival, stay, check-out and post stay.
- Improve employee experience by optimizing their tasks, especially the tedious ones. This allows them to dedicate their time to what, in our case, is most important and what they do best: focus on the client.
-Improve the communication between the different departments and teams to gain efficiency.
- Improve productivity/efficiency with automation,especiallyin more administrative, repetitive or bureaucratic tasks, ensuring in the process improved response times.
- Reduce time to market. New needs, new expectations are arising veryquickly, and digitization should help implement new technologies quicker.
- Innovate and open new sales channels or new sales opportunities that without digitalization would not be easy or could be impossible to afford.
- Brand recognition and online reputation. Having these tools allows you to have a powerful own sales channel, to give clients the opportunity to use their own devices to use services… all of this improves customer loyalty andhelps to attract and retain talent because they see you as best in class.
- Data: digital through technology, we can understand customer behaviors, we can see consumption trends (not only in terms of client consumptions, but also in energy, data…). Furthermore, the ability to store vast amounts of data helps an organization to make better decisions, react faster to new trends and identify, predict and maybe even prevent potential issues.
- Support sustainable commitments: with the implementation of paperless initiatives, we reduce paper and water consumption, and also reduce the need of physical space and improve access to information.
And how we can do it?
People are the key. We should never forget that. Tohave a successful change of mindset and culture, you need employees, an organization’s most important asset, to be engaged in the project. They need to be trained and involveduntil the culture of innovation becomes a natural part of their DNA. They should see digitalization not as a threat but an opportunity to grow, improve and elevate the company to a higher new level.
A successful digital transformation implies a change of mindset and culture and must be supported by a profound and global strategy
This implies a new way of working. Generally speaking, we cannot spend 2 years developing a new project because,by the time it is ready, everything could have changed, rendering it useless. It is necessary to work in a more agile culture,motivating and engaging teams to increasethe digitalization speed (decisions need to be taken quickly and teams should have more autonomy), promoting continuous improvement, learning by doing, minimizing or eliminating the resistance to change…
Risks
Good governance during a company’s transformation journey is a must; not having it could lead to multiples risks, including achieving the opposite of what you set out to do, like reducing your speed or increasing your costs.
But the most critical risk is the technology itself.The intense use of it generates a huge dependency. You should have defined a disaster recovery plan for any potential issue, disaster or failure toavoid a sudden stop in your operations or even your business.One of the main reasons for which this could happen is a security incident. It was already an important topic before pandemic but during the last two years the risk of suffering a cyber-attack has exponentially increased. Putting up as many walls as possible to protect your company is vital: firewalls, EDR´s, proxy´s, MFA, ATP´s, SIEM´s, bot manager… and a good SOC. But 0 risk doesn’t exist, and you must always be preparedto minimize damages, in case they were ever to happen.
In this sense, and because companies are made of people, who can be the best of assetsbut sometimes also the weakest link, increasing theefforts in training and awareness in everything related to technology is one of the best ways to reduce risks.
