Recently, regardless of where you look, you’ll find features on Digital Transformation. Digital or physical blogs (including this one) and magazines are full of articles on the digitization of companies, the advantages, drawbacks and risks and the most efficient way to undertake this procedure. And this occasionally leads us to lose sight of the main issue: Digital Transformation involves a number of key technological tools that only make sense if the organization has a profitable business model with defined procedures and is geared to today’s needs.

Anything else sets a company up to fail disastrously: Digital Transformation would be more likely to reveal weaknesses in working models and processes that, if not put right, will cause more problems than it solves.

In these hectic times, company transformation is a given, not a choice. The world is moving and changing at an ever-increasing pace as business managers well know. Customers, like competitors, also perceive and understand this. Companies unable, or unwilling, to recognize coming changes and adapt are unlikely to succeed. Nothing new of course, except for two things: the speed and extent of said changes are greater than ever. We should bear in mind that, while many enterprises seem totally focused on Digital Transformation, it may be as well for other adjustments to take place first.

There are various factors that strongly influence a successful outcome to remodeling company processes:

• Target: What does the business want to become? To achieve? Why is this transformation necessary? The aim behind it is to give companies the long-term ability to adapt to new needs and features in their field, and increase their overall competitiveness. 
•  Personnel: In any given company, employees can hinder the chances of success if they don’t understand, accept, or even consider it feasible. Regardless of the time and resources that may have been poured in, resistance to change is perennially ingrained in all companies. That’s why it’s so important to consider the makeup of the personnel and provide the training and awareness programs required for workers to become the true drivers of change.
• Consistency: This is intrinsically linked to the target and involves keeping true to your strategy in order to achieve it. Problems arise when your objective changes (which, in addition to additional expenses, could also cost you your customers and other players in the market), or you’re constantly changing your strategy to achieve said goal. The latter may be even more damaging than the first, as it generally makes you lose credibility within the organization and demotivates or disgruntles employees, who may start looking for other jobs – or, even worse, stay!

For a company that devotes itself to technology, as is Teldat, the process of transformation must be constant and continuous. Otherwise, to keep operating in a market as demanding as this for over 30 years would have been impossible. As for the definition of targets, our transformations are linked to significant modifications in our technology and business model (i.e., focusing on new product lines dedicated to software defined networks and on foreseeable market changes where we are already at work). Regarding our personnel; many young and enthusiastic people have joined Teldat over this last year. They are offering new and exciting perspectives on how to do things, which fully compliment the experience of our older hands and greatly favor internal changes.

And the consistency of our objective and strategy (given the enormity of transforming corporate WAN networks) is something that will become very evident to all our customers and followers in the following months.