If you look back at our parents’ days, or even at times when we were in 5th grade, the world around us was not the same as it is today. It was those days when everything ran manually – the invoices, bus tickets, bills, and everything you think that has changed today. Not only did the manual method give a chance to sellers to cheat the businesses, but it also led to many misunderstandings and miscommunications financially within and outside the families. And especially, industries faced a massive downfall. However, people and enterprises felt the manual method was ineffective and started to explore alternatives.
And today, the most wanted solution is all around you. People are updated, businesses are skyrocketing, and new millionaires come out of nowhere daily. What do you think happened to the world we once lived in? Industries are branching out in other parts of the nation, digital bills are in force, companies are selling digitally, and many others. What has changed the way businesses operate? It is the internet, and then the term digital transformation comes up. And precisely, what technologies enable digital transformation? Read further to know everything about digital transformation.
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1. What Is Digital Transformation?
It is the process of replacing the traditional methods that businesses have been using for decades with recent digital technologies for the company’s growth and to serve customers better, often called digital transformation. And usage of digital transformation technologies includes every aspect of the business – operations, productions, servicing customers, and many others.
Digital transformation is not a constant process. Instead, it is an evolving process, just like the world of the internet. The internet is an ocean growing massively with new technologies, and enterprises experiment with all the booming technologies to find what fits their requirements the best and help them stand ahead of their competitors. No matter how many techniques and technologies enterprises experiment with, their goal remains constant, to serve their customers the best they can.
2. Why Is Digital Transformation Essential?
Multiple digital transformation initiatives come with their features and abilities, and the purpose of all digital transformations is to make changes in how businesses operate. Hence, all enterprises need to adapt to the current technologies to serve their customers better than their competitors.
A study conducted by Bain and Company shows that 8% of MNC companies witnessed massive growth after investing in digital technologies. The best feature of digital transformation is that it allows you to evolve with booming technologies, enabling you to move from one technology to another effortlessly. Especially for enterprises, it is essential to invest in one of these technologies to meet their end goal.
3. The Benefits of Digital Transformation in Enterprises
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While there are hundreds of advantages on a list, adapting to digital technology helps industries evolve in three key areas.
3.1. Productivity with Low Labor Costs:
Every business look for alternatives to cut down on the costs they bear on labor and others and to increase their revenue with a low budget. And precisely, the digital transformation initiative does the same. Once invested in digital systems, you do not have to train your employees on how to proceed with a particular task when digital systems can automatically do it. With proper digital transformation strategies, productivity and the numbers in revenue go uphill over time.
3.2. Gear up In Customer Experience:
Customer experience includes serving customers in the physical and digital worlds. However, people in the current world are tech-savvy. Hence, people hang out agreeably online on their mobile phones, and it is always easier to engage and solve your customer’s needs through emails, live chats, social media, and others.
The internet says businesses that interact and engage with their audience or customers on their social handles see massive growth in their end goals over time. And behind all of this, digital transformation plays a significant role.
3.3. Help You Stand out Of the Crowd:
The business world is getting saturated as more technologies are coming up. At times like these, you need to move towards something that helps you show the difference between your business and the rest so that people can trust you. And digital transformation technology assists you do that by guiding you through multiple digital paths to adapt.
4. Substantial Aspects of Digital Transformation:
Customers are the pillars of their success in every aspect when talking about any business. There are a couple of things to consider when transforming from physical to digital. If not, it can be detrimental, and your whole business system could fall apart. Top experts advise that these five areas should get more importance when adapting to multiple digital channels.
4.1. Digital Twins
A digital twin is a process of representing real-world objects digitally using real-world facts and data. To simplify, it is like the image you see when you think of your yet-to-release product or the updated version of an existing product, but you show it digitally as a 3D image. Digital twins include jet engines, wind farms, and giant entities such as buildings or even whole cities. Large business giants use this technology to replicate processes to predict how the products or services perform after their launch.
These kinds of technologies help you provide the best customer experience because nobody likes interruption – it can be a small change such as the software update as soon as they install it, the digital products malfunctioning within a month, or many others you encounter in your daily life. A successful digital transformation strategy puts this on top of the list to ensure everything is good with its launch.
4.2. Privacy
Most technologies in today’s digital age are vulnerable to stealing information online. Gone are the days when people had to worry about physical world problems, and now, with slight changes, it turned to concern people about their privacy online – it can be anything, such as their names, email IDs, contact numbers, user names, passwords, and their bio-data like family details, and more. If you manage to provide the privacy that your customers require, your business is already halfway to success because employees and customers do not support convenience when it costs their privacy.
These hazards mostly happen when moving from one technology to another technology.
4.3. Culture
Before putting digital transformation efforts into your business, you should deeply consider how your business’s culture will change because changing some functions in business can be challenging, and without your team’s guidance and other employees’ support, your strategy does not last long. However, here are the top three things you should clear before adapting to any digital transformation strategy.
- Culture Is Unnoticed:
From employers to employees, do not talk about the culture unless there is a problem in the work you do. Nobody speaks when everything is under control, but if the situation is at its peak, everybody underestimates the new business processes with the old techniques. So, you should have another strategy to deal with out-of-nowhere cultural circumstances.
- Hard to Change the Existing Culture:
Changing the work culture and how the business operates can be daunting because replacing the culture you have been following over long years is not an easy task – changing technologies requires your employees to learn new computer skills within a short span, and transferring the data requires a 100% attention, even a slight mistake can take a toll on your business, and employees work schedules changes.
Changes might take nearly a year to get rooted within the culture, considering all the key factors. Before even thinking about transformation, you must understand how you will overcome the problems on your way.
- Guide Employees:
Since employees build your brand, you have to take the responsibility to guide them through the entire journey. Particularly in the beginning stage when you introduce the new measures. Restrictions would arise, team leaders might not support the idea, people may leave the company due to a sudden change, and you may fall behind the deadlines. In any case, you have to be ready and guide them smoothly.
All these changes might even take a year or two to implement effectively. And having a clear picture of your goals can help you along the process. For digital transformation success, you must have patience, dedicated resources, and high analytical skills to analyze the progress you made.
4.4. Augmented Intelligence
Augmented intelligence is beyond artificial intelligence. While artificial intelligence focuses on machines behaving more like humans without any human assistance that replaces humans, augmented intelligence focuses on assisting businesses and people without replacing humans. Although both use machine learning and follow the same path, they differ in how they work.
Augmented intelligence’s machine learning does not perform decision-making. So you can augment the analyzed data accordingly. Ensure that you adapt to augmented technology, as it will help you provide accurate results while you can modify them at any time.
4.5. Product Management
The process of researching the market in your industry, auditing your business plans, delivering the best product to the public that serves a particular problem, monitoring the development, implementing strategies to market the product, and maximizing the results is digital project management. Having the best team will help you enhance your business. However, to reach what you dream of, along with the best team, you should have deep research skills in that particular industry, and the product you release should serve the community.
For instance, giant tech companies like Apple, instead of aligning with the healthcare industry, Apple released a product that can measure the health of the wearer. It serves the community where people can check their time and metabolism in one place.
Following the mentioned measures can help your business stand out from the crowd. Yet, here are the other technologies you can adapt to for better performance.
5. Top 6 Digital Transformation Technologies
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There are many technologies to consider when talking about digital transformation, and the technologies that are booming now are artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing, IoT (Internet of Things), and big data.
5.1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI ML is more than technology in a business when generating accurate information and insights about your brand and the competitors. From startups to the tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, uses AI technology more than ever to analyze the competition to provide the best seamless customer experience. As AI matures every day and as more people adopt it, AI is clearing the path to solving all the real-world problems in the upcoming years. Not only does this robotic process automation technology ease human lives, but it also opens new opportunities and disrupts human lives in a better way.
According to an article by the Times of India, “By 2060, artificial intelligence will rule the world in every aspect – they said that AI would write some of the finest works by 2049, by 2024, robots will do better jobs at translations, and by 2053, AI would perform surgeries.” It happens because technical to non-technical industries like the healthcare system are widely implementing AI technology.
5.1.1. Why Should You Adopt AI ML?
Adapting to AI and machine learning helps you to perform the tasks that humans cannot do, predict, or analyze. It can perform works like providing the best customer experience, increasing sales by analyzing the market stability, providing tight security for users’ data, business operations, and many other roles like HR positions.
5.2. Cloud Computing
One of the primary problems that most people and businesses encounter is storage, and cloud technology helps with it by providing a temporary storage system without one having to worry about hardware. Instead of buying, possessing, and supporting physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing capability, warehouse, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The most well-known social handles and the tech giants like Instagram, Dropbox, Google, and all brands that work on software technologies are adapting to cloud computing. It is an on-demand IT resource that enables you to access data anytime from anywhere, and you do not have to worry about storing your photos as a user and data centers as a service provider.
5.2.1. Why Should You Use Cloud Computing?
Business flexibility, efficiency, scalability, security, increased collaboration, and reduced costs are a few reasons to shift your business model from hardware to cloud computing. With cloud computing, you have the flexibility to access data as efficiently as it was from all parts of the world at a low cost.
5.3. IoT (Internet of Things)
The Internet of Things is essential to your business because IoT enables you and your team to work smart as they get control over their tasks. IoT furnishes enterprises with a real-time look into how their systems operate, delivering insights into everything from the enactment of machines to supply chain and logistics functions. IoT allows your brand to automate processes and reduce labor costs while cutting down on waste and improving service delivery, manufacture, and supply of goods at low prices.
It also includes translucency in customer transactions. As such, IoT is one of the essential technologies of everyday life, and it will continue to pick up steam as more businesses realize the potential of connected devices to keep them competitive.
5.3.1. How Can the Internet of Things Be Helpful to Your Business?
The primary goal of IoT is to reduce labor charges by automating most of the things running manually. So, adapting IoT can help you save tons of money, especially if you are a budding entrepreneur.
5.4. Big Data Analytics
Maintaining an organization is not an easy task when it comes to marketing your services or products. It requires you to deal with many insights and data collection to be the industry expert and serve the community the best you can. In the competitive world, data is the pillar of any marketing and business success, and the data you get from the campaigns you run and market and the industry research you do can sometimes be structured, unstructured, and unprocessed.
A successful data curation can change the status of your business, but how can you do it – dealing with huge chunks of data and finding the information that is beneficial for you? And this is when big data analytics can assist you in finding the most helpful information from more pieces of information to frame the right strategies and choose the better decisions.
5.4.1. How Can Data Analysis Help You in Digital Transformation?
Data analytics helps you save time and increase the productivity of your workspace by providing you with the best information you need to plan the best strategies to market your business and make better decisions for the next quarter of the year.
5.5. Mobile Technologies
There is no specific technology called mobile technology, but if you optimize the things you invent or create for mobile, it can do the whole thing because recent studies have proved that businesses that focus on mobile have seen drastic improvements over the past couple of years. According to recent calculations, 91.0% of the world’s population uses phones, while desktop users have had a rate between 70 and 80% for the past few years. So, looking at statistics, not all people can use desktops, and it is essential for you to also look at mobile users.
Next time you develop something like mobile apps, websites, and webpages, ensure to include almost every feature for mobile. Also, people use mobile phones to work as they commute from one place to another. Hence, it is essential to improve customers’ experience through mobiles.
5.5.1. How Does Mobile Technology Contribute to Digital Transformation?
Mobile technology plays a vital role in every part of the business. Focusing on mobile technology helps you stay connected with your customers and the targeted audience through emails, push notifications, video content, blog posts, and others, which every firm tries to achieve and is also a part of a successful digital transformation.
6. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation or robotic technology is one of the most evolving changes in the digital world to replace humans to cut down on employees’ costs, and robots can bear the tasks that humans cannot, such as analyzing thousands of bytes of information and generating accurate results. Although it may still require human assistance in the areas where human expertise is needed, the RPA industry is expected to grow by $2.9 billion in market cap in 2022 and beyond.
5.6.1. How Can RPA Help You in Digital Transformation?
Robots help you with every aspect of your business – analyzing information, performing human tasks, and others, saving you time to focus on other areas where you are needed the most.
6. 3 Areas of Every Digital Transformation
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No matter how many transformation strategies you follow, they all come across these areas.
6.1. Process Change
The vital step and the pillar of everything you do are understanding what you want to do. Understanding your goals helps you in the process when you are in search of the best software that you want to adapt to or the technology that fits all of your needs. Not just that, it will assist you in teaming up with the right people, getting quality projects, and, most importantly, your defined goals will show you a path to transform your business successfully digitally.
Once you have planned how to transform, search how it works for your competitors and others in your industry. It will help you understand your current process, the changes you can make to your current working process, and the steps you have to take further. After you implement all the required changes, adjust your methodology accordingly and ensure to monitor daily.
6.2. Business Model Transformation
It states that whatever you do, you do it to stay out of the competition. There might be situations when you have to remodel your business strategy to reach your goals. And it is something every business does in today’s digital world because your competitors always look for ways to attract people. Remember, it is your business, and you have to take responsibility to find a way to stay at the top of the list.
6.3. Domain and Cultural Transformations
Domain transformation is moving to cloud technology (check this point out under the top 6 digital transformation technologies), and cultural mutation is changing how businesses work (check this under Substantial Aspects of Digital Transformation).
Final Words:
Digital transformation is one of the big moves and the most crucial step any business can take today, yet, it is as seamless as it was not before. Although there are multiple technologies you can adapt to, all focus on improving customer service and support. However, you must make the right decisions and acclimate to the best practices to stand ahead of others.
Last Updated on by ritukhare
