Raise the Bar for Business Success with Digital Transformation
These days, every keynote, panel discussion, article, or study related to how businesses can remain competitive are emphasizing non-stop on the benefits of “digital transformation”. The buzz has now become a roar. However, there can be some confusion around the topic because digital transformation will look different for every company, so it can be hard to pinpoint a definition that applies to all. In this blog post, I’ll try to demystify this concept and provide insight on various technology enablers of digital transformation.
Just about every industry is undergoing some level of digital disruption. In this digital economy, your business needs to continually evolve, innovate, and respond quickly to change to thrive in this environment, requiring a strong relationship between business and information technology (IT), i.e., become a digital business. However, most CxOs and managers still believe the digital world is far away and that things don’t have to change immediately for them, because the business relies on traditional practices and loyal customers. As a consequence, their competitors, if they happen to be digital leaders, will massively outperform them.
Today your business success lies in offering digital services that make the life of customers easier and their daily activities more convenient. In this day and age, customer satisfaction is guaranteed by the the right service, product or information at the right time. For this, you need devices, technologies and ideas to make that happen. There should be an alignment between your overall corporate strategy and the digital initiatives that you’re pursuing in order to transform your core business system and to pivot your business model toward growth. A Gartner survey reveals that digital revenues for companies will increase dramatically by 2020. The bottom line is that digital business will serve as a major revenue engine, and how well individual organizations capitalize on that opportunity will be determined by how effectively they can achieve digital transformation.
Becoming a digital business means creating novel digital products, services and business models to interact with customers, employees and partners digitally. This could be a digital product or delivering a new digital service based on data related to an existing offering or physical product. This is a must if you wish to remain competitive in this digital economy. For example, think about Uber as an alternative to taxis, which is revolutionizing the way we hail a cab, and Netflix, which has evolved from fulfilling video rentals by mail, to providing digital entertainment and recommendation services, to delivering content online.
Becoming a digital business means, focusing more on trends and feedback and adapting your business accordingly to develop new offerings and enhancing and/or modifying processes related to development, sales and marketing. To do this, a business must leverage analytics and social media to better understand customers and trends.
Becoming a digital business also means you optimize your operations. Key ways to optimize operations include using technology to improve performance and productivity, empower employees with improved communications, and moving toward data-driven decision-making .
Now that we’ve covered what it means to be a digital business, let’s take a look at the technology enablers that can support a successful digital transformation and achieve this agility:
APIs — Makes it easier to discover and consume digital services from across the business, both internal and external. APIs are what you need to create digital assets with what you already have. They represent the digital products and services you have in the company. Companies that don’t have APIs can’t go digital. Basically, to become digitally transformed, a company must somehow build APIs.
Integration — Even a small company has massive integration needs. For example, a business with around 100 employees will use software for various needs. These reside in silos. When you need to understand what’s going on in the business, you need to integrate all these apps. Even if you are a company that starts today, an integration problem will arise. For example, a common need is to integrate the customer relationship management (CRM) system with the legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) or accounting systems in order to link financial information to assist customer service. 99.999% of the time, you will need to connect to another service. The problem will never go away. That’s why integration is fundamental.
Security — Security is a foundational aspect of digital transformation. It’s probably the number one worry someone has about going digital. If you are going to become digitally transformed, you need unified identity management in place. Security has many aspects associated with it. Single sign on is having one username and one password tied to one place and allowing users to log in to multiple applications. Authentication and fine grained authorization is figuring out who are all the people who can access your systems. Identity provisioning is adding new users to the systems. Identity bridging is authenticating and authorizing users with different types of credentials because different systems produce different credentials. Identity federation is allowing 3rd parties to handle the security — for example, allow users to visit a web app and give options to log in. They can log in using a username and password or else log in using Facebook/Twitter/Google etc. In the latter case, they get sent over to the 3rd party which asks for information from user and confirms their identity. The user is already a valid person in another system and you trust that system.
Artificial Intelligence — This provides “intelligent” approaches to computing via machine and deep learning. How can AI help your business? Here’s an example: If your website deals with a lot of inquiries or you take a lot of customer telephone calls, then add a chatbot and start researching products that utilize voice recognition. Chatbots have reduced support costs by as much as 30 percent. Even small businesses can start using AI to their advantage by leveraging various technologies. Be proactive and make AI technology a part of your strategy.
Smart Analytics — Really think about the KPIs that make your business work and optimize around them one at a time. We are talking about all the numbers that matter. The number of calls for each API, logins, what products customers like, what did they save from your website — it’s all about learning customer needs and discovering trends through analysis. You can store data and analyze on a hourly/weekly/monthly basis (batch analytics) or analyze as it’s happening (real-time analytics). The data stored over a long period of time can be used to run some machine learning algorithms to figure out crucial patterns.
IoT and Mobile Apps — With data provided by connected devices, businesses can make intelligent business decisions. For example. if you’re a business that relies on warehousing, manufacturing, or storage, you probably use remote scanners and similarly high-tech devices to help your workers keep track of inventory item by item. In the near future, smart devices should be able to keep tabs on inventory changes completely automatically, freeing up your workers for more important, cognitively demanding tasks.
When employing the technologies discussed here as enablers of a digital transformation, it is important to build internal platforms that provide you with both the agility and adaptability to change rapidly and meet future market requirements that no one can predict. There’s no doubt that Digital Transformation can be a real game-changer in the success of your business.
Today, WSO2 serves as a trusted technology partner for some of the world’s largest enterprises engaging in digital transformation initiatives. WSO2 provides software purposely designed to meet today’s demands for an agile approach to API management, integration, identity and access management, smart analytics and the Internet of Things. Additionally, WSO2 solutions give enterprises the flexibility to deploy applications and services on-premises, on private or public clouds, or in hybrid environments — and easily migrate between them — as needed.
For more insights on digital transformation with WSO2, visit the following links.
