Digital Transformation: Modernizing the Boardroom and Beyond

As we continue to navigate living and working through an ongoing pandemic, digital transformation, unsurprisingly, is top of mind for organizations around the globe. Our Modern Governance Summit 2021 convened digital transformation leaders and experts on the cutting edge in the field. Throughout our various sessions, a few trends and best practices were clear:

• Ensuring access to the right resources
• Promoting flexibility throughout your company
• Viewing change as an opportunity for growth

Ensure Access to Necessary Resources

Ensuring leadership has access to the right information and resources is paramount in any digital transformation endeavor. Whether this is through hiring experts in the field to lead a specific team or group to handle the transformation, ensuring you have technology experts on your board and in your company leadership, bringing in third parties to assist in digital transformation campaigns or any combination of the above, expertise is a vital resource. Once you have the right people in place, they need access to the right tools, platforms, communications and information required for smooth transitions. This way, when change happens unexpectedly, your organization has positioned itself to be able to respond quickly and effectively.

''Board meetings are now a mix of in-person and virtual. If your technology is set up correctly, it should be seamless.'' Jean-Marc Corredor, Vice President and Senior Legal Counsel, T. Rowe Price Group, Inc.

Promote Flexibility

Instilling a culture of flexibility and adaptability is also important. Over the course of the pandemic, organizations that failed to adapt to new ways of operating suffered immensely, and many did not survive. On the other hand, organizations that did adapt discovered new efficiencies and greater resiliency.

Transformation of any kind can be disruptive and scary. Ensuring your organization has the right processes, culture and methods in place by setting the tone from the top down can ensure your employees are as well prepared as possible to learn and eventually thrive throughout digital transformation initiatives �- planned or unplanned.

Treat Change as a Growth Opportunity

Digital transformation should be viewed throughout an organization as an opportunity for growth, learning and success. As a result of the pandemic, one unexpected positive has been the way many of us were able to adapt to doing our jobs in a much different, virtual environment. Now that limited in-person gatherings are much safer than they were a year ago, the efficiencies of digital transformation has taught us that we can save time, money and resources by forgoing some of the travel and commuting once associated with our jobs. Likewise, some of the barriers to talent acquisition have been overcome, as companies have learned that distributed teams can function as well as �- and in some cases better than �- teams in one physical location. Consequently, organizations have been freed from geographic limitations and enabled to add more innovative and diverse talents to their teams.

To learn more about achieving greater success with a digital transformation, download Building the Optimal Future of Work: A Technology Roadmap.