Community and Evangelism in Digital Transformation

Inertia, cynicism, and doubt can make it difficult for organizations to commit to digital transformation. Employees, executives, and stakeholders might resist digital transformation initiatives even after you explain its benefits. It often takes more than explaining benefits. You get the best results when you can build a community of digital transformation evangelicals who get others excited about adopting new technologies. In this article we'll discuss what evangelism in the digital transformation context looks like and how it could work for your organization.

Finding the Right People for Digital Transformation Evangelism in Your Company

Ideally, enthusiasm for digital transformation should come from someone in a position of authority. For example, a CIO (Chief Information Officer) can introduce supervisors to the benefits of digital transformation while implementing policies that support adoption. Supervisors might resist at first, but most of them will follow policy. It doesn’t take very long before the CIO’s encouragement becomes infectious.

IT managers also have significant influence over a company’s digital culture. Managers can develop a community of enthusiastic digital transformation by urging employees to try new technologies. Reward creative thinking, early adoption, and strategic planning – even when employees don’t get the results they expected.

Employees who know that they can take planned risks will seek out emerging technologies that can make business processes more efficient and accurate. Having an energised group of 'end users' who can champion a particular digital transformation imitative will go along way to improving the ultimate success of that initiative.

Steps Toward Developing a Community of Evangelists

Terms like “enthusiasm” can feel vague to a lot of people. What concrete steps can you take to grow a tech-savvy community that’s excited about trying new tools? Fortunately, there are a range of low cost activities that you can complete that serve to build a community within your organization. Some of the steps you might try include:

• Hosting workshops that teach employees and consumers how to use emerging technologies.
• Organizing hackathons that encourage people to experiment with solving problems in diverse, creative ways.
• Producing videos and informative articles that show employees how to introduce digital tools into their daily workflows.
• Adding some room to budgets for departments to try new digital tools that might benefit the organization.
• Holding up innovative thinkers within your organization as examples of how organizations evolve and become more competitive.
• Sharing evidence that an informed approach to digital transformation can help companies save money, improve customer satisfaction, and streamline processes.
• Breaking down department silos by inviting all department heads to events e so they can share their questions, concerns, and solutions.
• Ensuring stakeholders that a low-code API solution like DreamFactory can integrate new tools with legacy systems.

Ways Communities Benefit From Digital Transformation Evangelism

The benefits of digital transformation will vary depending on the organization. When you get members of your community truly excited about exploring new technologies, you can expect to see benefits like:

• Input from consumers who want to participate in transforming your processes.
• A happier workforce that looks forward to new challenges and experimenting with interesting technologies.
• Lower overhead, which will improve the financial performance of the organization.
• A reputation as an industry leader that forges new paths instead of following in someone else’s tracks.
• Diverse tools that will appeal to more members of your organization, regardless of how they learn and work best.

None of these benefits, however, will happen without the initiative of members of your organization who are willing to invest their time and effort into learning new technologies and understanding how they translate to the 'end user'. Time should be invested to cultivate members within your organization and to give them the tools and knowledge they will need to build the desired community.

Transform Your Organization With Help From DreamFactory

You can’t succeed in building a community of evangelists until you find solutions that improve the way in which employees do their job and enhance the quality of their work. DreamFactory provides a comprehensive API management platform that compliments any digital transformation program. Start your free trial with DreamFactory to easily combine databases, transform SOAP into REST, and create APIs that connect all of your digital assets.