Has Your Digital Transformation Strategy Reached its Endgame? Learn, What's Next
Aug 28 2019 | 08:16 PM | 5 Mins Read | Level - Basic | Read ModeVandita Grover Contributor, Ziff Davis B2B
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Vandita is a passionate writer and IT enthusiast. She is a Computer Lecturer by profession at the University of Delhi. She has previously worked as a Software Engineer with Aricent Technologies. Vandita writes for MarTech Advisor as a freelance contributor.
Is adopting the latest technologies and automating business processes the end of the road of your organization’s digital initiatives? Is there more to a digital transformation strategy? Let’s explore.
Most digital initiatives in the past few years have focused on investing in technology to improve efficiency and productivity. They are integrating disparate systems to ease collaboration and communication within business verticals.
Now the time has come to accelerate efforts on digital transformation and evaluate how it has impacted your bottom line.
Before that, let’s look at a few statistics compiled by Forbes:
- 34% of companies have already undergone digital transformation
- An additional 34% of companies plan to go fully digital within a year
- 56% of CEOs said digital transformation has led to revenue growth
- 31% of companies have invested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get ahead of the competition
What Does the Digital Experience Strategy Look Like Today?
Initial boardroom discussions on devising a digital experience strategy focused on how to move to a digital-first approach and improve efficiency. That was an incremental process that could improve and automate business processes, boost productivity, systematically incorporate big data to workflows, and customize experiences for customers.
While most companies have jumped onto the digital experience bandwagon, others have started to feel the need to go digital in the next two years.
So far technology has been at the helm of digital transformation – to focus on automation, speed, employee(s) re-skilling, and creating a digital culture.
Learn More: 7 Essential Tips for Successful Digital Transformation
But this approach has not been transformational in its true sense.
Digital Experience Strategy – 2019 and Beyond
Even though the first wave of digital transformation has managed to disrupt the organizational ecosystem, the change is far from over.
Let’s look at how the digital experience strategy could evolve in the future.
1. Rise of AI/ML and Analytics
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) will be the colossal forces that will drive business intelligence.
AI will help tap into the deep sea of unstructured data generated by mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, images, videos, text, location information, etc. AI systems armed with ML and feedback loops can enable intelligent systems and augment their functionality.
Analytics will move beyond the exploratory stage and will be more predictive to extrapolate patterns, especially in consumer behavior.
2. Disrupting Customer Experience
Digital transformation will play a pivotal role in shaping customer experiences (CX). Companies will adopt a digital-first approach for CX. This will include accelerating responses to customer queries, reducing Service Level Agreement (SLA) time for customer issues, deploying virtual assistants such as chatbots for customer service, and anticipating (not just understanding) customer needs via predictive analytics to reach out to users at the opportune time.
3. Collaboration and Integration of Business and IT Processes
To survive the ruthless competition, business and IT processes will mature and become a cohesive unit to accelerate the transformation process. For businesses to transform seamlessly, we will see more cross-functional teams that will focus more on products and customers.
More companies will invest in integrated platforms that pull data from disparate sources and drive marketing, sales, and analytics processes.
Learn More: Without a Collaborative Mindset, Your Digital Experience Risks Failure
4. Autonomous Enterprises
A shift from automatic to an autonomous enterprise is the ultimate goal of a digital transformation strategy and it is an ongoing process. The journey from automation to autonomy will differ across organizations. An autonomous ‘digital’ organization will have a robust infrastructure with software, hardware, embedded automation, and AI/ML combined with the power of human intent and intelligence.
The C-Suite members will focus on building an environment that operates with the right tools and processes to predict normal and abnormal scenarios, based on data and feedback from ML algorithms to take necessary actions. We can expect digital systems powered by heuristics in the future. This will not only help ease human effort but bring more convenience and value to customers.
Learn More: Effective Digital Transformation Strategies: An Interview with Andres Angelani of Softvision
The Bottom Line
Transformation is a never-ending process and far-sighted decision-makers understand that it is not just the technology that enables transformation. Future digital transformation strategies will focus on preparing for change, embracing technology, reskilling the workforce, leveraging data, and marrying human intelligence with technology to improve customer experience.
How far has your digital transformation strategy come? Tell us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook; we’re always listening!