In this age, achieving business growth along the lines of digital expansion is a highly sought-after initiative. Most businesses have taken steps toward this initiative to expand and incorporate digital functions into their operations. Technology is constantly evolving, and you must match its speed if you want to stay competitive with your business.
Such expansion, however, is faced with significant challenges that threaten to derail these corporate initiatives altogether. Some of the common digital bottlenecks that threaten to derail the process of growth for your business include the rapidly-changing face of technology, increased constraints on corporate digital platforms, and technical challenges that come with the implementation of digital systems in your business.
Rapidly Changing Technology
Technology is continually evolving, and you must keep up with it within your business to ensure that your business remains relevant to the market. Since the introduction of internet technology, more technical solutions in the business field have been introduced, all of which are aimed at ensuring operational efficiency.
The pace at which these solutions are being developed and released is fast in a way that can pose constraints on your business. With each business solution requiring a technical accompaniment such as staff training, equipment purchasing, and the allocation of budgetary funds to facilitate successful incorporation of each solution, keeping up to pace with each one of them can prove to be a major logistical and financial challenge.
Serving a Wide Range of Market
Your business may desire expansion to serve a broader market. Breaking the current market barrier effectively may impose additional demands upon your business. One of the areas that such an expansion may create a constraint upon you is the need to remodel the current phase of technology to meet the expansion.
For instance, with technical systems such as websites and mobile apps already in place in your current business, you may need to expand their functionality to ensure that they can reach out to a broader market. In this regard, customers with different orientations of life such as linguistic differences would demand to be catered to for the app development by including functions that support their languages. Technical differences may include developing web platforms that can effectively integrate with other platform types that cater to mobile phones and computers.
Digitization Process
The whole process of transforming your business from paper-based operations to digital platforms may impose some additional challenges upon you. The digitization process is challenging because it requires a considerable amount of resources regarding capital and labor to ensure a smooth transition from paper to digital.
The process can be easily derailed by many different factors, the least of which is by running out of the needed resources before finishing. Configuring the digital platform to ensure a smooth transfer of information from hardcopy to digital copies would consume a lot of time and may be plagued by major technical errors. It can be easy to map and plan such an involved transition, but affecting it without any hiccups is demanding.
Capital
When it comes to digitization and expansion of your business, capital is a necessity which ensures the ability of the whole process to go smoothly. Capital plays a vital role in every step of the process, such as purchasing digital equipment in preparation for the transition. In cases where your business does not have sufficient capital to allocate for the transition and expansion, the process can become extremely slow or even fail to take off as expected.
Capital can also limit the business in regards to securing technical digital solutions. Optimally, acquiring the best digital solution for your business would be a huge step forward in the transition process, but the type of digital solution you can afford would depend on the amount of capital set aside for this change. For instance, if your supply chain business needs to advance to an e-commerce platform, the development of a suitable web platform would depend on how much capital you have to put towards it. Also, other functions of the site such as the database speed would vary depending on the cloud hosting package you were able to choose.
Technical Errors and Support
Another major digital bottleneck that can constrain your business are the numerous technical errors that your business’s digital expansion process will face. Digital solutions hosted over the internet and in the cloud are often plagued with website and server downtimes. This can critically impair the ability of the business to achieve its much-desired level of customer service.
For a business whose operations are primarily on an internet platform, such downtimes can cause setbacks to the whole operational process. Banks, in particular, are highly affected by this problem. With most banks having transformed their operations to run on digital clouds and web-hosted platforms, a failure in one of the serves could mean that the whole bank would have its system entirely crippled.
Digital Space
Corporate digital growth and expansion demand a lot of space, both in the business facility and in the cloud storage centers. Your business would, therefore, need additional space in the office to store files. With most hard drive storage devices having a limited storage capacity, you may have to secure an additional storage room where digital information can be stored in designated drives.
Additionally, if your business relies on cloud storage systems, you may have to expand their storage capacities to accommodate more data. Such space would be an additional expense for the business.
Digital Security Lapses
When it comes to the digitization of business operations, security is a major issue. Some of the most prominent digital security issues that businesses face today include hacking into stored data over the internet platforms like cloud storage systems. Digital security lapses can be particularly costly to a company, especially when these lapses lead to the loss of sensitive information that can be maliciously used to dent your business’ reputation.
These occurrences can, however, be managed and contained by using various digital security solutions. Some examples of security solutions that can be used are biometric verification systems and strong passwords with two-factor verification.
Operational Changes
A final constraint that your business can go through is related to the fact that there may be some operational changes to the internal workings of the business. A business undertaking a digitization program would need to train its workers on how to run under the new digital operating platform. Such a change demands time and resources to affect.
When a business, for instance, has multiple branches, training employees to give them the required level of competency can be a major hurdle. In addition, such a multi-branch business faces issues when it comes to syncing all operations in branch together.
Business growth can be impeded by numerous digital bottlenecks. Whenever seeking to implement digital improvements, it is important to consider each type of constraint and how they can be resolved by fast-tracking the digital changes. Having an understanding of the digital constraints and mapping the process of affecting the operational changes ensures that the course of digital growth is smooth.
Capital costs could stall the process of digitization while operational management across your company could hinder the process altogether. The rapid changes in technology, coupled with the increasingly competitive market, however, demands that such constraints be overcome for your business to achieve its desires changes.
References:
Verisign | Can You Afford Downtime?
Business News Daily | 8 Benefits of Online Data Storage
Staples | Five Common Security Lapses Made by Small Businesses