Digital is the norm. Our culture has ensured that we shift towards a digital world in which everything from train and plane tickets to recipes are digital.

Whilst consumer products have led the way in terms of digital, businesses are catching up and are coming around to realise that digitising processes is the right thing to do. It’s not easy and it doesn’t happen overnight but there are steps you can take to make it a smooth transition.

In fact, there is a 4-step path to digital transformation you can take...

Understand - How is paper used in your business today and what could be changed?

Educate - Set targets, make a business case and change user behaviours

Execute - Replace paper processes with digital processes

Improve - Use data and automation to take transformation to the next level

Simple, right? Here’s a bit more detail on each step and what it involves:

1) Understand

The first stage of digital transformation is all about understanding where the business currently is and what can be changed. It’s possible that in some sense you’re beyond this and you’ve already found a need for change based on current processes being slow and inefficient.

If you aren’t quite there yet, then a simple place to start is considering how paper is used. There is such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paper and they’re distinguishable in nature by figuring out if paper has a valid reason to be part of the process.

I.e. ‘good paper’ could be documents that originate on paper, such as handwritten letters or notes and ‘bad paper’ might be documents that originate in digital format but are printed at some point, and never get re-digitised.

Understanding this will help you progress to the next step in the path to digital transformation; educate.

2) Educate

Now, just because you’ve understood where changes can be made and where processes can be improved, the rest of the business might not.

The educate step is the time to coach the business and make a business case for the proposed changes.

A good way to do this is to set some targets, build a team of ‘change champions’ who support the changes you’ve proposed and get management buy-in. The result should be support and sign off to start executing a digital transformation process and a changing (positive) attitude towards digital transformation.

3) Execute

The execute stage of the digital transformation path is all about putting actions in place.

Having understood what processes can be digitised and educating others in the company, getting management buy-in along the way, you now have the opportunity to prioritise processes and take action.

Start small. Don’t try and take the largest, most important business function and try to digitise it, hoping it’ll all be fine.

Part of taking action on digital transformation is ensuring it doesn’t disrupt processes or have negative effects but rather makes processes better, easier and faster for people. You could start as small as stopping the printing memos or agendas for meetings and distribute them digitally instead. If this lowers the printing costs and doesn’t affect how the meeting takes place, that’s great.

4) Improve

Once you’ve taken action on digitising some of your processes, it’s possible to measure the gains and explore the potential for digitising, automating and simplifying other business processes.

Once you’ve mastered digitising small processes, bit by bit you can digitise larger processes in finance or HR, so long as there is a benefit to doing so. When you digitise a process, there should be an improvement - it might be reduced cost, or it might be giving time back to employees to work on higher-value tasks.

Remember that when it comes to the improve stage, analytics will be your best friend. If you can prove the numbers, then improving and digitising more processes will be much easier. Analytics will also guide your improvements by showing what’s working and what’s not.

Digital transformation isn’t something you just ‘do’ and it’s also not just a process of binning all the printers and hoping people find a way round it. It’s a step-by-step process that starts with small, inefficient business processes and eventually works up to more important, paper-heavy business processes.

With these 4 steps, you can begin to understand what needs to be done in order to make digitisation happen in your organisation, however, there is more to it than what’s above and every step has extra processes from target setting to communication.