Successful digital transformation brings a number of benefits to businesses. Not only does it streamline operational processes, create better customer experiences and empower employees, but it also opens the door to globalisation.

However, with a huge 73% of companies failing to provide any business value from their efforts, it’s evident that digital transformation best practices are still proving elusive. While there are many reasons for failure, businesses need to take action and improve the chances of success. This goes further than ensuring the digital models exist in one place, but requires knowledge and information to be shared with all employees across departments and locations, allowing collaborative decisions to take place without constraints.

Collaboration and digital transformation

A recent report from Fujitsu’s Fit for Digital, discovered that over 52% of business leaders worldwide believe their organisation won't exist in its current form by 2021. This demonstrates the impact of digital transformation and in order to navigate the disruption businesses must develop innovative ideas at speed.

Whilst adopting emerging technology enables new ways of working and faster decision making, collaboration is a vital catalyst in activating digital transformation. Employees must be on-board and prepared to develop and scale new initiatives. But most importantly, communication and collaboration tools must be available to enable staff to share their expertise and work together to achieve the common goal.

According to a survey by electronics manufacturer Sharp, almost half of the respondents claimed their colleagues had forgotten to share important information or documents with them. Organisations who aren’t set-up to promote collaboration and the sharing of information or knowledge, are likely to be missing out on a number of opportunities to grow, inspire new ideas or generate new business. This is where collaboration tools play their part. By enabling successful collaboration, employees are able to create and share knowledge with one another to drive digital transformation efforts.

Emulating face-to-face meetings

With a range of digital collaboration applications available, it is difficult for companies to understand how best to execute digital transformation and what this means in the context of the current business climate. Over time we have discovered that BIM and other 3D cognitive models have helped the human mind better conceive a project, which is hardly surprising as we live in a three-dimensional world. We collaborate best at a ‘natural meeting’ as this is how our social activity, bodies and minds have evolved over millions of years. Research has also suggested that the more ‘natural’ the medium of collaboration, the better the cognition and the long term result.

Therefore businesses need to consider solutions that emulate a round table collaborative meeting with people and resources to deliver optimal collaborative cognition. These systems have been built around the understanding of how humans have evolved from a ‘campfire drawing pictures in the sand’ with social collaboration and this is the same type of meeting that still pertains today. Combining people’s interaction and thinking with a virtual space to work will provide benefits from increased team alignment, and better productivity to improved innovation and higher efficiency to achieve goals. Not only will emulating face to face meetings radically reshape business operations and establish a collaborative workspace, but it will also help companies remain agile and intelligent in their digital transformation quests.

Understanding the digital shift

As the digital playing field evens out, businesses will need to acknowledge a shift in the level of expectations that they face from digitally mature customers, employees, and business partners. Amid these evolving expectations, every company is investing in digital technologies, raising the question of how business leaders can set themselves apart from their competition. To capitalise on this post-digital future, they need to understand people at a holistic level and recognise the need for flexibility and collaboration.

Overall, digital transformation is worth nothing without people. Long term business success is determined by its employees and the way they interact and collaborate over digital data. By establishing a more ‘natural’ medium of collaboration, businesses will benefit from improved knowledge sharing across all departments and locations, allowing digital transformation decisions to take place without constraints. Ultimately, digital transformation is not just about the technology the employees are using to get work done, it’s about changing how teams work together and collaborating to support the business’ strategic goals.