Digitally Transforming in a Regulated Industry: How You Can and Why You Should

No organization is exempt from the increasing pressure to innovate and digitally transform its processes. The taxi industry, for example, learned this the hard way.

Ridesharing startup apps like Uber and Lyft rose up seemingly overnight, flouting any regulations while state and local governments rushed to create them. The regulations did eventually come for the apps, but it was too late for taxis – consumer behavior was the changed for good. Now, urban-dwellers want to order rides from their phones and skip the manual payment process altogether, something taxis never were and still aren’t equipped to offer.

This same idea applies to more technical regulated industries as well – such as financial services, healthcare and legal. It’s much harder for them to upgrade their processes and tools, whether internal or external, but it’s still just as necessary.

Within the financial services industry, for example, nine out of 10 enterprises say they face significant challenges in making digital transformation happen within their organizations. As for healthcare, 70 percent of hospital executives feel they don’t have the resources to support new digital transformation investments.

But despite the challenges of innovation, doing so is a must in order to survive. Regulated industries are at an especial danger of falling victim to early disruptors because their regulations provide additional barriers to innovation. Even though these disruptors eventually get forced under regulations, it’s the early success they have that can kill the original establishments held strictly to certain regulations.

For those in regulated white-collar industries, innovating within the bounds of document creation and management is an intuitive inroad to achieving digital transformation. This is especially true if documents are part of your product, such as public accountants carrying out an audit or healthcare administrators sharing HIPAA-sensitive documents with other doctors to coordinate patient care.