Your employees are just starting their journey with your organisation. They are just as excited as you to embark on their new journey as you are to welcome them to be part of the remote team.

Before the pandemic, your new hires will come to the office for their first day and finally meet their colleagues for the first time, get introduced to the whole department, and have a little tour of the office before they get to know their role better on the training.

But it’s not like that to onboard your remote team. You are probably not even in the same time zone as your new hires. And most likely, your whole remote teams are all in different time zones.

However, onboarding is crucial to guide the new hires to navigate within the organisation regardless of their prior professional experience. According to CareerBuilder and Silkroad Technology, up 10 per cent of the employees are leaving due to poor onboarding experience.

Onboarding is very important that even Amazon emphasizes it as part of their company culture called Day one. Day one is about being constantly curious, nimble, and experimental. A lack of guidance and direction during the first few days of a new job can be frustrating and disheartening.

What is included in the onboarding process?

Each company will tailor its onboarding process depending on its needs and culture. However, it generally consists of new hire document collection and introduction to the company.

Also Read: Why HR tech will make Asia’s next unicorns

If your company does not have one, creating a thorough onboarding process will benefit your company and new hires. Here are some of the must-have onboarding items that need to be checked after sending away the offer letter to the candidate.

Introduction to the company and culture

Every company has a different working culture, and it is essential to let your new hires understand on the get-go. Sending away a culture playbook will help your new hires know what to expect and how to act upon the company’s culture properly.

Understanding the company’s value, vision, and mission will guide your new hires to align their vision and mission with the company. To replace the traditional office tour and colleagues’ introduction in person, it is important to provide a document where they can find a certain material or who they can reach out to for a certain issue in virtual onboarding. In this session, you can provide the hierarchical structure within the company.

Introduction to the company’s communication channel and management tool should be included in this session. Be sure to explain this part as clearly as possible.

Otherwise, your remote new hires’ productivity might be in jeopardy due to the confusion in navigating their way through the remote workspace.

Product/service introduction

Not often do your new hires come from similar industry backgrounds to your company. Therefore, your product might be completely foreign to them.

Even if they come from similar industry backgrounds, it doesn’t guarantee that they know about your products/services already. Failing to educate your new hires about the product/service might result in frustrations and miscommunications.

This might result in your new hires not being able to optimally perform their roles and responsibilities aligned with the product’s growth direction.

Whether or not the new hires’ position is closely related to the development of the product/service, this part of the training should not be missed!

Legal document collection

It is necessary to collect some legal documents to proceed with the employment process. These often include personal identification, employment contract, social security number, work permits, tax forms, and other legal documents.

Authenticating these documents can also be an issue when it comes to remote hiring. What type of documents to collect varies in every country according to each country’s local labour law.

Also Read: Top 3 signs your business will need a remote tech team

Failing to collect the right documents and not promptly might result in putting your new hires’ employment status at risk and on hold. They will handle this section for you if you are hiring through the Employer of Record (EOR) service. It will save your company time and hassle when outsourcing this particular process to a staffing agency.

Legally speaking, your new hires are not officially hired unless this process is completed.

Slasify supports your company to onboard candidates within 15-30 days and will directly collect all the legal documents from the candidates and provide them with all the company’s benefits such as social contributions package and insurance.

How to conduct the onboarding process for your remote team?

Time should not be an issue because these onboarding items can be delivered in a group meeting, one-on-one meeting, or a written (pdf, ppt, printed booklet, etc.) document for the new hires to review on their own.

If time is the essence of your team, you can combine written documents with virtual meetings. However, it’s not suggested to replace the virtual meetings with only written documents completely.

Whether you are a small or big company, creating a solid onboarding plan is a great investment to build a strong and sustainable team. If you are thinking of expanding your team globally, start building your virtual onboarding program, and playbooks will be a great start for your remote workforce.

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Startup lore is filled with stories of heroic underdog entrepreneurs with unconventional ideas who silenced their haters, riding market forces that others seemingly couldn’t see, and taking their place in the pantheon of startup greats.

Many believe that coming up with a winning business idea is an act of divine inspiration, and it’s easy to see why. But the reality is that coming up with ideas for winning businesses is about as mystical as baking a cake. If you know the right recipe, anyone can do it.

So how do you consistently dream up successful business ideas? Certain kinds of ideas, and certain ways of generating them, are much more likely to succeed than others.

Below, I’ll share a handful of methods that are simple, effective and impactful. These have all been learnt and honed by Rainmaking Venture Studio, where we have built 65 startups with Fortune 500 partners and invested in thousands more.

The essential ingredients

Most business ideas begin in one of two places, either by solving an observable problem or by building a vision of the future. Good business ideas do both, they solve a problem and build toward a vision of the future. 

The very best ideas, however, solve a problem, build the future, and capitalise on the individual strengths of the founders and team behind them. Let’s discuss each of these ingredients and how they make a recipe for great ideas.

Ingredient 1: Solve observable problems

Great startup ideas begin with a specific problem to solve.  

Much of our time at Rainmaking Venture Studio is spent looking for big, important problems, and then taking deep dives to understand the needs of different stakeholders surrounding those problems. There are a few approaches that both aspiring startup founders and large organisations can take to find the right problems to solve:

Build what you wish someone else would build for you

Starting with a problem you have personally is one of the most productive ways of generating ideas. Not only is it a great source of ideas, but you have the benefit of starting with yourself as a customer from day one. Get in the practice of noticing when something is frustrating and wondering, “why do I have to do it this way?”

Internal frustrations are also a great source of ideas for corporate ventures. Amazon Web Services famously started as an internal solution that made it easier for IT teams to launch new web servers. As of writing this, AWS generates 13 per cent of Amazon’s total revenue and 100 per cent of its operating income. 

Look into industries that seem broken 

Industries that are inefficient or outdated are ripe for disruption and change. Looking into these industries for problems and inefficiencies is a great starting point for startup ideas. 

Rainmaking has built a large number of ventures in industries such as construction, logistics, and energy precisely because they largely have not been updated for the digital age and one can observe many inefficient, manual processes that are generally accepted as the status quo. While most people may see the challenges, few believe that there could be a solution because it can seem that things are simply “stuck” the way they are

The cash advance lending industry is another example of such an industry. Jake Hill, founder of the startup DebtHammer, realised that payday lenders regularly overcharge borrowers in interest and the legal costs of disputing it are often more than the loan itself.

Also Read: 9 steps to create a successful product launch strategy

Most accept this as an unfortunate and unavoidable side effect, but Jake decided to dig deeper under the surface and realised that the actual legal process for disputing is itself not very complex, and could be done without a lawyer, but most people simply do not have the time or know where to find the right information.

He then designed a way to automate the dispute process to bring down costs and then set borrowers on an attainable plan to get out of debt.  

Ask people what is most stressful and painful about their lives

This strategy involves asking people questions about their lives to discover the challenges and problems that they face. The challenge with this approach is that people do not naturally talk about their problems, in fact, many people are not aware that they have challenges at all. They have simply accepted the status quo. 

Sometimes we can ask directly and people will point us to their challenges, but more often, we need to look for clues that indicate people have an unmet need.

For example, where are they hacking together their own homemade solutions? What do they spend significant amounts of time on despite them viewing it as low value? Likewise, where do they hate spending money but have to anyway? What behaviours or tasks do they ritually repeat, and most importantly, why are they doing them? 

Caution! Pitfalls ahead

These are three reliable ways to generate ideas based on problems. But even following these recipes, there are several common mistakes I see founders and venture teams making.  

The first pitfall is choosing a problem that isn’t big enough. A large number of people need to have the same problem or the problem needs to be of a significant cost for each person for there to be a compelling market opportunity for the solution. There’s a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?

When looking for a problem to solve, many people already have a solution in mind. While having a hypothesis is useful, being too closely attached to this solution can close them off to other potential opportunities that are much bigger, more compelling, and much more attainable.

We call this a ‘solution looking for a problem’. Unfortunately, only a small per cent of these solutions ever find their problem, and too many hours and dollars are wasted chasing shadows. 

The third pitfall is not going deep enough on the problem to really understand it. By no means does this mean exhaustive, lengthy, academic research, quite the opposite, we want to move fast.  But very few problems are shallow. 

Most have deep roots and we need to understand those roots if we are to really nail the customer problem. As they say “a stitch in time saves nine”, and an investment of time upfront almost always pays dividends later down the line.

Ingredient 2: Build a vision for the future

But what about those more revolutionary, unconventional, “spark of genius” ideas?  Instead of narrowly focusing only on the problems of today, forward-thinking startup founders can form a thesis about what is likely to happen in the future, and anticipate the second and third-order effects many steps ahead.

By looking at trends in technology, macroeconomics and society, one can identify ‘signals’ of what the future holds and then imagine different scenarios that might play out. These scenarios are the spark of inspiration to imagine businesses that could either create new value or solve problems in the future.  This approach is often referred to as ‘Futures Thinking’.  Let’s look at an example in action.

While working in the energy utility industry, Fabian Le Gay Brereton realised that the direction of change for the energy industry meant a massive shift away from fossil fuels toward distributed solar panels and batteries. 

While that might be a widely held view, few people have thought about what that transition will mean for society and the energy industry. Instead of selling and building static power plants, power companies will need to design small, interdependent systems that dynamically communicate and send power when and where it is needed. This is no easy thing to design when all of the current engineering & pricing models are based on an old paradigm of centralised energy generation. 

Also Read: Guide to successfully start realising your product ideas

In anticipation of this paradigm shift, Fabian built Gridcognition, an analytics software that helps renewable energy developers design and optimise distributed energy systems. Fabian began building the solution in 2020, and if he had asked developers then whether they needed a powerful software to design renewables systems they would have said that all they needed was a spreadsheet. Fast forward just two years and Gridcognition is seeing adoption from the world’s largest solar power developers.  

For corporate ventures, however, this approach can be more powerful and more challenging.  On the one hand, corporations start with a massive advantage, they have established scale and competitive advantage that ought to enable them to dominate emergent sectors of the market with ease. 

On the other hand, their existing assets and footprint create conflicts of interest. If a future scenario is likely to undermine my core business, why would I want to invest in that scenario and accelerate that threat? This is what Clay Christensen famously dubbed the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’.  

The great thing, even for corporate teams trapped in this dilemma, is that anyone can learn to practice Futures Thinking. All it requires is observation, imagination and maybe a little courage. Amy Webb from the Future Today Institute has great perspectives on trends of directional change and many resources that show you how to spot ‘signals’ of what is coming.         

Focus on what is probable, not just possible

On the other hand, it is easy to make mistakes on timing when painting a vision of the future.

For example, if we look at the impact of artificial intelligence on cars and self-driving capabilities, one probable future is that all cars in the future will be capable of self-driving.

One possible result is that nobody will need to own a vehicle because autonomous fleets of cars will drive around the city and pick us up whenever we need as a concierge batmobile. Many startups in the past 10 years have bet their future on this reality. 

Unfortunately, a great many of these startups radically underestimated the timeline of this future and underestimated the human desire for ownership and hoarding. One day, perhaps none of us will own cars. 

But that day is not today and it does not appear to be very soon.  The result is that the future painted by these startups is taking far too long to reach, and they are running out of cash long before the world catches up to their vision.

Ingredient 3: Play to strengths

The final recipe is to leverage personal strengths as the bed of knowledge to generate winning ideas. Successful startups will have a strong team-solution fit to do exactly that.

A strong team-solution fit means having a founding team of uniquely qualified individuals who are able to use their personal strengths and knowledge to identify the right challenges to solve, with the skill sets to develop the solution. The strengths of the team can range from industry experience, such as renewable energy, to personal passions, such as stamp collecting.

Playing to strengths is equally important for corporate ventures, but rather than the strengths of individuals, organisations should look more broadly at core assets & capabilities that could provide a competitive advantage.

Here’s an example:

One of our corporate partners is one of the world’s largest renewable energy producers. They have a world-class ability to deploy project-based financing and have a strong balance sheet on which to finance infrastructure assets. So, we asked ourselves how could we apply this strength to a market that is outside the organisation’s core business and what other kinds of infrastructure could be financed?

The result was an IoT startup that helps restaurants save energy. The startup benefits from using the corporation as a project financing partner to invest in IoT hardware. The corporation, being a Fortune 500 company, has a cost of capital lower than the startup or its competitors could achieve on their own, giving the startup a significant competitive advantage.

Don’t overlook intangible soft strengths

Especially when working with large organisations, we find that people tend to identify and value hard strengths, such as physical assets and technical capabilities, more readily than the less tangible “soft” strengths.

Soft strengths are anything which could be advantageous that cannot be physically or legally transferred, for example, consumer trust, networks of people and partners or a unique perspective on a market. While the intangibles might be more difficult to identify, they are no less useful for generating ideas and can be powerful boosters for new ventures. 

Also Read: How to pursue a product idea into a successful business

When looking for soft strengths that we could leverage with corporate partners, we always ask a few questions to help tease them out, what is the mission of the organisation and how could it galvanise internal support for a new venture with a similar mission?

What groups of people outside the company does the organisation’s network provide access to and how could they be potential customers, collaborators or supporters for a new venture? What is the brand known for and how could we bring the same values to another niche or sector?

Pull it all together

The very best businesses are those that can pull on all three recipes; they solve an observable problem, have a bold vision of the future, and play to strengths.

Stripe, the unicorn online payments company is a prime example. The founders, Patrick and John Collinson, were working on several internet startup ideas prior to Stripe and wondered why it was so difficult to accept payments online. They had found a problem worth solving. 

At the time, the online payments market was not particularly large, and seemingly well covered by companies such as PayPal. But, the Collinson brothers believed that a mainstream shift to online commerce was coming soon and that solving the friction with payments would unlock a massive new market opportunity. They had a vision of the future. 

The brothers are both engineers with the technical know-how to personally build the solution. They played to their strengths. Stripe is now a market leader in online payments and is still growing at nearly 50 per cent a year.  

It can seem that good ideas are difficult to generate. Actually, they’re easy to find, because there are many, many problems in the world, and more avenues to shape the future than ever before. If you’re having trouble finding them, it’s just that you haven’t yet learnt the right recipe. 

Once you learn how to notice good startup ideas, you’ll see them all over the place.

This article is written as part of the Corporate Venture Launchpad programme. The SG$10 (US$7.5 million) million pilot programme by EDB New Ventures aims to enable large, established companies new to corporate venture to launch a new venture in Singapore within six months. 

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Startup founders and executives often struggle to delegate. As a result, they get overwhelmed and burn out.  

Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information, recently wrote:   

“A few weeks ago, I was reporting on two possible M&A deals and asked my sources why each company was looking at a sale versus an initial public offering down the road. In both cases, the answer was the same: The founders were done. There’s not a founder or CEO I talk to these days that doesn’t have some version of that story. They are exhausted.”  

Samuel Ajiboyede, the author of the book The Entrepreneur’s Diary, said, “One reason a lot of startup founders and entrepreneurs get burnt out is the tendency to take on too many responsibilities.” His message is, “Don’t be afraid to delegate.”  

If you are like a lot of startup leaders, several beliefs keep you from delegating:  

• You think you save money by doing everything yourself.  
• You think no one will care as much as they do.  
• You believe it will take more time to teach someone to do tasks than doing it yourself.  
• You do not want to put more work on others’ plates.
• You do not know how to delegate.
• You have a tough time giving up control.  

These beliefs are reasonable when you are small. But if you do not delegate, your business cannot grow beyond the time you can spend on it. You also run the risk of exhausting yourself.  

What you should delegate  

If you want to delegate, you have to decide what you should hand off to others. A valuable tool for choosing what tasks to offload is the Eisenhower Matrix, based on former general and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s statement, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. Urgent problems are seldom important, and important problems are seldom urgent.”  

Steven Covey turned this comment into a matrix with four quadrants to organise your tasks and who should do them.

• Tasks that are urgent and important, must be done by you
• Tasks that are important but not urgent, schedule these for later
• Tasks that are urgent but not important, delegate these
• Tasks that are neither urgent nor important, eliminate these tasks  

Also Read: 6 leadership lessons I learned after we raised our seed round

What tasks are urgent but not important? It is a little misleading because calling anything unimportant can be confusing. For example, an Asana report found that managers spend 58 per cent of their time on administrative tasks like:

• Email triage
• Calendar management
• Travel planning
• Expense reports 

Calling these tasks unimportant is misleading. They are important but do they need to be done by you? Probably not. Consider this:  

• Most executives spend three hours a day on email
• It takes 25 minutes to schedule a business meeting  
• It takes 12 hours to plan a door-to-door business trip
• It takes 30 minutes to complete an expense report  

You can easily hand off these tasks to others. Other candidates include:  

• Invoicing and payment processing
• Contact management and CRM maintenance
• Document prep
• File management 

Does it save money to do this work yourself? Think about it this way, you are paying yourself to do tasks that you can outsource to others at a lower cost.  

What you should not delegate  

Going back to the matrix, to decide what you should not delegate, list the tasks that only you can do. These tasks require your judgment, experience, and leadership, and the buck stops with you. Examples include:  

• Defining and amplifying your vision and mission
• Business strategy and planning
• Hiring the key executives
• Terminating executives
• One-on-one meetings with direct reports
• Fundraising
• Meeting with investors, partners, and key accounts
• Board meetings and reports
• Keeping your team aligned and inspired  

These are executive functions core to your business that only the top executive in a company can do. Depending on the size and status of your business, you might also be responsible for:  

• Product definition and roadmap
• Sales strategy
• Go to market strategy

Who you should delegate to  

One reason executives don’t delegate is that they don’t want to give others more work to do. That makes sense when you look at the nature of the tasks you should offload. They are administrative tasks, and you may not have a team member at the appropriate level with the right skills to do that kind of work.  

Also Read: The 5-part agile leadership guide that will make you a better business leader

You could hire some to do your administrative work, but it is probably not a full-time job, and administrative assistants are hard to find. The Lensa Index found that administrative assistants are the third most challenging position to fill. Also, the time and expense of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training become one more distraction.  

Consider virtual assistants  

Startup executives and owners are turning to virtual or remote executive assistants as a cost-effective way to delegate time-consuming administrative tasks. The virtual assistant market grew by 40 per cent in 2020 as remote work became the norm and executives realised offsite personnel can be productive and effective.  

The virtual assistants usually work in areas of the world where college-educated, English-speaking talent is plentiful but opportunities for meaningful work are scarce. And most virtual assistants are already trained and have experience supporting executives, and have developed best practices for the tasks you want to offload:  

• Email organisation  
• Calendar management  
• Travel planning
• Expense reports  

There are a few ways to find virtual assistants, all with pros and cons.  

Hire a freelancer through a job board:  

• Pro: the lowest cost option
• Con: risk of a bad hire, you must do the management and quality control

Hire an independent contractor through a virtual assistant agency:  

• Pro: more vetted candidates make this less risky
• Con: You still must do the management and quality control

Use a managed virtual assistant service provider:  

• Pro: the service provider hires, trains, and supervises the virtual assistants, so you do not have to
• Con: not the least expensive option

Develop your superpower  

Sam Corcos is a four-time founder and CEO. Sam says, “Delegation is a superpower. It also takes practice.”

If you have internal resources to take on administrative tasks, great! This guide should help you get started. If not, there are people from around the world eager to help.

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True Platform, a business SaaS startup, has closed a US$3.5 million seed funding from January Capital, Alpha JWC Ventures, Beenext, FPT Corporation and other unnamed angels.

The startup will use the funds to accelerate product development.

True Platform was founded in late 2021 by Hung Pham, who previously founded Base.vn, an enterprise SaaS platform in Vietnam. Base.vn was acquired by FPT Corporation, one of Vietnam’s largest corporations, in May 2021.

The startup is preparing to launch two major products later this year. They are Success.net, a customer-centric platform to help companies accelerate sales and services, and Rework.com, an operation platform to help companies work together.

Also Read:  SaaS platform Base.vn secures funding from Nextrans

“Today, SMEs globally lack budget and bandwidth to evaluate, provision, and maintain the different tools for their respective functions (e.g. HR, operation, customer support, finance). We recognise a need to provide a unified and affordable operating system for SMEs that enables a consistent user experience. More importantly, we support the founder, who has previously founded a SaaS company to achieve 7,000+ customers in six years,” said Jason Edwards of January Capital.

“We shared about the foundation of True Platform and its capital call with just a very few VCs, with who we have connected for long. We got an initial commitment of more than US$5 million in one month of talking. However, US$3.5 million is well enough at this stage of the company…we strive for creating not just the most usable software but also software affordable by millions of companies,” said True Platform Founder Hung Pham.

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Digital Transformation (DX) among businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak was a watershed moment, as it required businesses to relocate to online platforms in order to stay viable. Over the last two years, there has been an increase in DX among SMEs but there is still a percentage of businesses that are truly hesitant to adopt it.

In my opinion, the main issue lies in the interpretation of digitalisation for first-time users of technology. Business owners who are used to traditional methods of operating would be greatly affected as they do not know where to start, leading to a sense of hesitancy even in exploring the possibility of digital adoption.

Therefore, we have to be able to make digitisation more understandable by breaking it down into smaller, more digestible pieces that will eventually help them overcome their fear of technology.

In working with multiple businesses over the last 10 years, I believe that painting an accurate picture of the benefits that the adoption of digital tools will result in is the most effective way of convincing business owners who are reluctant to explore these innovative changes.

Understanding that clear, realistic returns on investment (ROI) and noticeable added value are what business owners prioritise, I think that it is crucial that technology consultants like SRKK take the time to give them a step-by-step guide on how the digitalisation journey will unfold for their individual companies.

At the same time, making sure that they adhere to preparing, planning, prioritising, and executing the five key pillars of digital transformation so their digital transformation journey meets their business objectives.

Leadership mindset and alignment

The first pillar is maintaining a leadership mindset and alignment because a DX journey begins with a robust mindset at a leadership level. This ecosystem of leaders needs to collectively agree digital transformation will reap benefits for them, and is feasible while being worth the time, money, and effort spent.

Very often, leadership teams can be either aware or unaware of their internal problems. Leaders who are unaware tend to view digital transformation as an impossible feat, and mostly subscribe to the mindset of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Also Read: How can design-thinking promote consumer trust in the digital world

This can be remedied, as a start, by attending tech vendor workshops, webinars, and events to build confidence in digitally transforming.

Team leaders who are aware of their organisation’s problems believe in DX and are taking baby steps to solve urgent and important problems with technology, although they don’t yet have a clear picture and roadmap.

This can be overcome by using an impact/effort matrix to prioritise and get the easy wins that continue to fuel the DX journey. Impact/effort matrices help companies course-correct fast, align team priorities, and identify the best solutions to a problem whilst saving time and effort.

Once the organisational problems are identified, leadership teams should adopt a solution-aware mindset to build robust digital transformation roadmaps with sufficient resources to support well-thought-out initiatives to ensure sustainable, long-term growth.

Business-led technology roadmap

Once a company’s leadership mindset has been fixed and they have a better understanding of the benefits of digitalisation, they would need to build a successful business roadmap. When creating this guide, I believe that simplicity is best for beginners and the simplest way to a robust, actionable roadmap is to divide it into two main categories:

• Business value drivers
• Environment, infrastructure and governance

These parameters ensure that the company leaders know what they are trying to digitalise, what the economic impact will be, how can they reach their goal and which area to prioritise.

Currently, the SRKK team has created a templated roadmap that has been leveraged by our consultants when they speak to different customers. It has helped us to engage the customers’ pain points better and we realised that more than 70 per cent of businesses benefitted from the clearly defined SRKK DX framework and started their DX journey.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Malaysian government-linked company (GLC) focusing on palm oil plantation, farming and livestock businesses embarked on their DX journey that included adopting Microsoft 365 for hybrid work.

As we have customised the different phases to help improve the customer’s business processes including their cybersecurity, when the customer decided to improve email security for their 744 information workers, the IT team reported a significantly lower amount of support calls related to malware, phishing and spam emails.

We believe that by having a curated DX methodology that suits the customers, they can keep progressing on their DX journey at a speedy pace yet at a lower cost.

Appointing talents to drive the digitalisation effort

Complement having the right leadership mindset and a robust roadmap are strong key talents to power this transformation process. Firstly, a  technology-literate business leader with an in-depth understanding of the company’s overall strategy and roadmap is needed to prioritize and sponsor projects throughout the DX journey.

Also Read: Why Singapore’s traditional sectors need a digital makeover

Moreover, this role will involve ensuring that implementations are value-driven. Next, a passionate change champion who is articulate, persuasive, and persistent is necessary to motivate change across departments, convincing their team members in embracing new challenges.

Furthermore, it goes without saying that having an excellent IT manager to coordinate and facilitate the tech selection process, and assist in pilots and implementations, while relating to their IT environment is a key role to have. Last but not least, whether in-house or outsourced,  Technical Resources are required to implement digital transformation decisions.

Culture

A common misunderstanding is that DX is completed when a company upgrades its technology. However, digital transformation is not about software or technology; it is about organisational agility. In an agile environment, employees are not penalised for “failing fast, and learning”, boldness is encouraged over caution, and there is more action and less planning.

Agility allows your company to respond quickly to changing market conditions brought on by DX whilst also allowing leadership teams to focus on strategic decision-making. It is important for companies to start practising a DX-friendly culture as it challenges the status quo and is unafraid of change.

This would eventually create a safe space for employees to try their strengths and discover their weaknesses, further fueling l innovation.

Delivery and adoption

Finally, whether your company’s digital adoption is successful depends on whether the implementations have improved the company’s performance.

To get a good idea of this, two-way communication between technologists and end-users is very much needed so that feedback is constantly communicated, thus leading to better adoption rates.

A more convenient way to implement this method of communication is through a Scrum and Agile framework where ‘scrum’ is a framework of rules, roles or events that are used to implement ‘agile’ projects efficiently.

This framework should be considered during implementations to ensure that cross-functional teams are communicating regularly, aligned on priorities, closing the feedback loop, and delivering value rapidly.

Hence, I hope business owners have gained a few ideas on how they can have productive conversations and effectively brainstorm around the five pillars mentioned here, and better prepare, plan, prioritise and pull off their DX journey.

With the reopening of borders and more businesses starting to bounce back, I hope that more traditional businesses use this opportunity to start digitalising their businesses with the help of these five pillars as I’m confident that it will make a huge impact on our country’s economy.

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