Rapidly evolving customer expectations, growing market pressures and overall organizational goals have fueled digital transformation in every industry. It’s projected that by 2025, global spending for transformational efforts is expected to reach $2.8 trillion.[1] Digital transformation is the process of leveraging new technologies, across all areas of an organization, to optimize operations and drive growth by providing new value to customers.
Digital transformation evolves the way an organization conducts business, enabling them to transition from outdated processes and legacy equipment with the use of new technology. Best thought of as a continual adaptation to a constantly changing environment, it’s a journey that strives towards optimization across processes, divisions and the business ecosystem as a whole. There’s many components and intermediate goals along the way. Rarely is there an end to digital transformation, it’s a way to meet strategic objectives and embrace a more agile operative method. It’s also critical in turning marginal into exponential growth.
It allows businesses to improve in three key areas:
- Customer Experience
- Operational Processes
- Business Models
Technologies of Digital Transformation
There’s a variety of technologies powering this digital transformation journey. Advancements in networking, hardware, software have all provided organizations with the ability to implement a digital strategy.
Cloud Computing: Organizations are moving from legacy systems to cloud based applications. Providing flexibility and scalability to meet business demands, data is accessible from any device.
Artificial Intelligence: AI can support many business needs including, automating processes, engaging with customers and enables smart decision making based on the large amounts of data it continually collects.
Internet Of Things (IoT): These sensors and software are being used in almost every industry. Continuously connecting, exchanging and analyzing data, businesses are able to leverage its insights. Real-time data is invaluable, helping to improve productivity, increase customer engagement and optimize efficiency.
Strategizing For Digital Transformation
A digital transformation has many considerations, stakeholders and components to it. Before executing a plan, a strategy must be built.
Assess Current Business Situation
An organization must assess their current organizational structure, everything from their culture to their processes. Conducting a business audit will help key stakeholders understand one of the most critical aspects of digital transformation efforts, what a company’s values are. These values shape what they want to provide their customers and how they want to do that. From there, it’s important to outline current operations, roles and processes. Another significant takeaway is to establish an organization’s weaknesses and anticipate future challenges, like network access.
Determine Goals
To successfully execute a digital transformation strategy, an organization must make sure that the plan they’ve created is aligned with their business goals. It’s the how and why.
Conduct Pilot Testing
For most companies, digital transformation completely overhauls their way of doing business. Processes that may have seemed to work good before may be changed, new teams may be interacting with each other and overall the customer experience will have been altered. Run pilot tests and collect feedback throughout the process. This will help gauge customer feedback before a full roll out, identify bottlenecks and help determine if an organization is ready for full scale implementation.
Create A Roadmap
Executing each previous step will now allow a digital transformation team to develop a strategy on how to overcome challenges and meet goals. Many times, a strategy will begin with considering reframing corporate infrastructure. They also must understand their employees’ current skillset and evaluate if any training is needed to meet the businesses goals. This will help determine the key roles and players at each stage of the journey.
Preparing For Change
Although digital transformation revolves around technology, people play a large and integral role in its success. To successfully execute a digital transformation strategy, employees must feel empowered to embrace change and to work differently. Constant communication and explaining to them the goal of this process is extremely significant. It’s important to understand their concerns, take feedback and encourage them.
The Future Is Now
Digital transformation builds bridges between organizations, their technology and customers. These new systems will allow businesses to build a bridge to the future by establishing new networks and ecosystems that will result with new business models to achieve future growth. This new digital world will revolve around data, actionable intelligence and most importantly connectivity.
A connected ecosystem is integral throughout digital transformation. Any type of network disruption will render these applications useless, effecting the organization and customers. During a digital transformation roll out, it’s critical to have always-on network access. The continuous addition of new applications places a strain on the network, which increases the likelihood of an outage. How to access critical applications when a disruption occurs should be one of the main considerations during the strategy phase.
When it comes to network outages, it’s never a matter of if it will occur, it’s just a matter of when and how long it’ll take to recover. Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform ensures that organizations have the connectivity needed throughout their digital transformation journey. Smart Out-of-Band and Failover to Cellular provide secure access to network devices through an independent management plane, the IT team can always access infrastructure, at every site. They’ll have a full view of the network at all times remotely, which gives them the ability to identify and remediate the issue quickly.
Also providing the necessary NetOps capabilities, necessary for many digital initiatives of future thinking organizations, Opengear solutions also enable secure provisioning of new remote sites. Something many businesses will constantly be undertaking, like in retail, finance and hospitality.
Opengear is here to help facilitate your digital transformation, on Day One, during an outage and every day.
[1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS48372321
