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Great leaders turn calamity into success. While the past two years have afflicted many challenges, the world has grown much smarter, more coherent, and responsive to digitally-enabled change. Digital transformation has turned into a key business differentiator rather than a mere buzzword used by leading multinational companies.
This blog breaks down key components shaping 2022’s ever-evolving landscape; and how IT leaders can turn them into business fuel to drive transformation.
Since the 1980s, businesses have been striving to create experiences that spark ingenuity. Although some successfully exemplified digital transformation by automating core business processes, it has been a long road for many industry players. The key to business excellence lies in how well IT leaders understand and adopt the ‘inverted firm model’, which is, extracting value from external stakeholders, partners, and the public.
One fine example of this phenomenon is how platform firms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon manage and maintain a sheer amount of productive activity from outside exponents. An important thing that has changed over the years is where companies invest in value creation; moving from internal employees to verticals outside the organization. Businesses following the inverted approach are creating better prospects for digital transformation since they can capture value from within and outside the organization effectively.
Leaders in tech have recognized the inversion route is critical to survival. This is why cloud, APIs, and other digitally accessible solutions have outmatched on-premises service deployments since they are easy to integrate, install, and maintain. A study comprising 179 companies shows how the adoption of interface technology (API) paves way for firm inversion creating room for accelerated digital transformation in enterprises. The API, as a sole communicator between different business modules, also provides external third parties limited but supervised access to internal resources.
Embracing digital is not a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ anymore, it is more about ‘how’. Value creation has become a cornerstone of moving towards the digital space. In the same study mentioned above, experts classified firms based on how they utilize API
technologies, whether to empower internal capital or to invest in their externally facing business strategies that provided business partners with valuable opportunities. The difference was striking as businesses that took the inversion route performed 38% better over a span of sixteen years.
Data itself is ubiquitous. For IT leaders, data is a goldmine with endless opportunities, but its power to generate value for businesses remains underutilized. For legacy firms, the potential of data remains untapped, unless they optimize the ways they collect, process, and utilize data from a stream of business variables, leading them to the in-demand digital transformation. Research in the Harvard Business Review calls this data ‘episodic’, based on mere events such as a closed sales deal or shipment from a vendor. In contrast, powerful enterprises are not anchored by such small events, which is when interactive data comes into action, that is, a bulk of users interact over their platforms.
In the US, Facebook and Google alone constitute half of the digital advertising market revenue is nearly $200 billion in sum, thanks to interactive data. What technology executives can do here is rather than guarding the firm’s episodic data for competitive purposes, they can draw a new class of insights by utilizing technologies like AI & ML to produce an ongoing stream of interactive data. Consequently, this helps businesses to be more inclusive with their positioning by creating new experiences with customers and yielding greater value.
Here is a quick run-through of industry use cases for effective data utilization.
Entreprises can practice widespread sharing of interactive data with third parties, customers, and stakeholders across various touchpoints to create business value.
eCommerce stores, by leveraging real-time data, can perform concurrent analysis of inventory, omnichannel retailing, and product life cycle to accelerate supply chain operations
Fintech businesses are performing advanced analytics on financial data to spot trends and predict future customer behavior to make informed decisions based on actionable insights.
Connected streams of patient data via IoT can help medical practitioners routinely assess a patient’s medical condition and vital signs, helping in better diagnosis and treatment.
The near-constant state of flux after the pandemic stirred up a lot of resistance to change. Since change remains inevitable, enterprises set forth technology ventures and unchartered territories. Cloud solutions and interface technology started replacing traditional system architecture. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) became mainstream with artificially intelligent solutions chipping in their part to digital transformation.
IT leaders are responsible for calibrating an organization’s technical end. For that purpose, they need to make sure that the right blend of tools and technologies are available where they work, at a reasonable value, and up to industry standards. While businesses are scaling globally, they are quickly jumping on the bandwagon of cutting-edge technology adoption. Generative artificial intelligence, hyperautomation, cloud-native platforms, and privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) are 2022’s top strategic technology trends identified by Gartner that will take the market by storm this year.
If you are looking to sprout your technology fabric on a wider scale, a data-driven strategy might be your best option. Once all the technical details have been outlined and you have a clear visibility of the bigger picture, start investing in solutions that are dearest to your customer. For instance, if a cloud-based solution reduces check-in times at your eCommerce store by 15 minutes, or if a robust ERP system, purpose-built for your specific platform, helps you increase customer engagement by 80%, it’s a win-win.
Businesses are prone to the tides of change. And to survive the age of digital, they must adapt. In today’s competitive global landscape, they must embrace innovation, and constantly invest in transformation initiatives built upon a data-driven strategy supported by the right technology backbone. The road to digital transformation might seem long with many dilemmas along the way, but it is the only way modern-day businesses can achieve long-lasting success driven by value.
Are you an IT leader in search of transformative digital solutions that can shape your business for the future? Contact us and find out how.
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