Strategizing your Digital Transformation, the right way

When the world is moving toward all things digital, businesses cannot remain immune to reality. In fact, the mature ones are looking at integrating SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) technologies in their quest for achieving business transformation. Others are focusing on addressing discrete business issues by integrating singular digital technologies. With digital transformation, businesses are aiming at streamlining their workflow/processes, enhancing productivity, reducing waste, responding quickly to customer feedback, and increasing ROI, among others. However, about 70% of digital business transformation initiatives do not succeed to meet their objectives. So, before understanding why such staggering figures for failure, let us learn about digital transformation.

What is enterprise digital transformation?

It is about transforming all aspects of your business by integrating digital technologies to deliver value to the end-customers. Here, enterprises do not always follow the well-trodden path but innovate and experiment to stay up the competition curve. Digital business transformation may require the legacy systems to be overhauled and migrate all resources to the cloud. It makes any enterprise agile, responsive, and productive. For example, a middle or large enterprise may go for digital transformation implementation by integrating its processes with the ERP software. This way, the management of the enterprise can track the movement of resources across the value chain and respond quickly to any sudden requirement.

To a large extent, digital transformation solutions can deliver the following outcomes.

1.     Better customer experiences: As processes get streamlined and bottlenecks are removed, the inherent glitches present in the product are identified and mitigated quickly. Thus, with a quality product that keeps on improving, customers derive better experiences.

2.     Operational agility: In a robust digital transformation strategy, activities like shift-left testing are introduced in lieu of the traditional waterfall model. As quality testing takes place alongside development, the process agility increases.

3.     Cultural change: Aspects like quality and security are often given short shrift over more pressing issues like faster time to market. However, with the adoption of Agile and DevOps - a result of digital business transformation, the employees across sectors need to change the way they work, especially when it comes to upholding aspects like QA and security in the value chain.

4.     Enabling the workforce: The workforce could work even remotely by accessing the cloud-based resources of the enterprise, anywhere and anytime. This can address issues related to absenteeism, system latency & downtime, or geography.

5.     Integrating digital technology: Arguably the core requirement of any digital transformation consulting, integrating advanced digital technologies can make the IT architecture agile, secure, and seamless.

To drive a digital transformation strategy successfully and achieve the desired outcomes, enterprises can follow this process.

1.     As per business needs: Businesses can implement transformation depending on a host of factors. These include changing customer preferences, market trends, business forecasts, automation, Capex, the advent of technologies, or rising operational costs, among others. It is important to understand your specific business needs as the journey can entail massive changes and disruptions. So, before opting for transformation, businesses should be clear about their destination lest they end up getting stuck.

2.     Identify the risks: Any digital transformation initiative can involve risks, which if not factored into the scheme of things, can leave an enterprise high and dry. These risks should be properly documented and tracked over a period of time.

3.     Know the requirements: It is important to involve all stakeholders in the digital transformation process and be realistic about the outcomes. Some of the considerations can include:

·       The destination of data and information: in-house, cloud, or a combination of both

·       Risk management implications

·       Technology requirements such as mobility solutions, cloud, or AI and ML, among others

Importantly, if the digital transformation strategy is too radical to implement and takes the users away from their comfort zone, it may create a fair share of challenges.

4.     Pilot testing: Once the risks are documented and the process thoroughly analyzed, a pilot test run should be conducted. This can give a fair idea of the type of challenges or qualitative changes brought about by the transformation exercise. Also, any issue with pilot testing will not impact the whole value chain but a small ‘manageable’ segment.

Conclusion

Developing a strategy for business transformation through digital technologies and initiating a culture change should not be complex or time-consuming to implement. The focus should ultimately rest on fulfilling your business goals and addressing your challenges.

Role of Cloud in your Digital Transformation Journey

In our technology-driven times, organizations that do not have an online presence risks going obsolete or lose credibility. Going digital has become a necessity for enterprises to remain viable, provide good customer experiences, and stay up the competition curve. Since success is generally measured in terms of customer experience, digital transformation becomes a key business requirement. And among the many proven technologies driving digital transformation and offering great customer experiences subsequently is cloud computing. This technology enables enterprises to have robust vision for the future, accelerate digital transformation services, and provide better experiences to the customers.

Businesses have begun to realize the inevitability and benefits of going the cloud way. In a technology-driven world with growing competition, the focus is on garnering transformational benefits rather than settling for the incremental ones. To achieve this, businesses require to set up a robust technology infrastructure. However, for any enterprise digital transformation initiative, the focus should be on remaining flexible and embracing the industry trends.

What is cloud computing?

The process involves the storage, maintenance, management, analytics, processing, and security of data by leveraging a network of internet-based servers. It is in sharp contrast to the data stored on a personal computer or a local server. The distributed storage and management of data help enterprises to make more informed and accurate decisions. Further, this helps them to improve productivity, streamline processes, save costs, innovate, accelerate time to market, enhance customer experiences, and achieve ROI.

Types of cloud computing

The cloud consists of three types of services viz., Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In SaaS, a third-party cloud provider hosts software applications and delivers them on demand to customers over the World Wide Web. Some examples of SaaS are Google Apps, Dropbox, Salesforce, BigCommerce, MailChimp, Hubspot, and DocuSign, among others.

In PaaS, the third-party provider delivers software and hardware tools, operating environments, database, or computing platforms that are needed to develop applications, over the internet. The examples include Windows Azure, Force.com, Apache Stratos, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Heroku, among others.

Similarly, in IaaS, a third-party vendor offers access to computing resources viz., storage, data centre space, security, scaling, network components, or servers, among others. The examples include Linode, DigitalOcean, and Rackspace, among others.

How the cloud can play a role in digital business transformation

To disrupt the status quo and stay competitive, enterprises embrace digital transformation services wherein they need to upgrade their legacy IT infrastructure. Also, to enable digital disruption, enterprises, besides streamlining their business processes, need to leverage advanced technologies. These include Augmented Reality, AI and ML, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others. Since these technologies demand heavy computer power and storage space, cloud computing comes as a savior. The benefits to be accrued from cloud during the digital transformation process are as follows:

Flexibility: To ensure the success of any digital transformation strategy, the business processes of enterprises can be changed many times. The cloud allows any organization to save costs by not investing in setting up and maintaining costly IT resources in-house such as software or hardware. This way the organization can remain flexible and agile as it can leverage cloud-based resources based on its requirements. For example, if a project needs greater computing and storage power, the organization can scale up its on-demand cloud requirement by paying an extra amount. The reverse can also hold true leading to the optimization of resources and cost savings.

Security: Any information stored in-house can be vulnerable to situations like security breaches, unexpected system downtime, and natural or man-made disasters. Since all data including backup are contained within a singular IT system, any security-related issue can wipe it clean. On the other hand, cloud hosting can maintain multiple backups of data in a distributed system. So, even if one node gets affected, the data in other nodes can remain unaffected. In cases of big data analysis where big chunks of data are involved, any system failure or security breach can have devastating consequences.

Quick prototyping: Any digital transformation implementation entails continuous innovation, testing, and delivery of products or services. This is where the cloud can help enterprises with platforms to build, test, and deliver/deploy applications bypassing the need for a complex IT architecture. So, if an enterprise builds multiple products, then the cloud platform can allow quick prototyping of such applications, saving cost and time in the process.

Seamless collaboration: Implementing digital transformation solutions would require every stakeholder in the organization to embrace a culture of collaboration. This is congruous to the requirements of DevOps that aim at breaking hierarchies or silos to achieve creativity, quality, innovation, efficiency, and glitch-free delivery. With cloud computing, different teams can work seamlessly in parallel to develop, test, and deliver applications. It allows access to computing resources, anywhere and anytime. Also, the optimal delegation of authority can be assured by controlling the level of user authority.

Cost-effective: Cloud services are highly flexible to user requirements. They offer a scalable model wherein enterprises only pay for services that have been used. Thus, there is no need to set up and maintain a costly IT infrastructure (hardware and software) thereby saving CapEx in the process.

Conclusion

The need to enable digital transformation has become imperative given the cost of setting up and maintaining a robust and functioning IT infrastructure. As business processes become agile with the inclusion of new technologies and the need to uphold greater user experiences, migrating to the cloud environment becomes a necessity. It helps enterprises to bypass the challenges of legacy systems and build-test-deliver quality software applications consistently.