Growing businesses through Digital Transformation

As we have seen in part 1 of the blog, the three steps in embracing technologies are digital competence, digital literacy, and digital transformation. According to IDC, analysts predict that global investments in digital transformation will reach $2.3 trillion by 2023. The uniqueness of digital transformation and the ability to create efficiency improvements are the significant advantages a technology-based firm has over legacy organizations. Companies such as Uber, Amazon, Apple, and Airbnb have used technology to disrupt entire markets.

With the rapid advancement of technology, tools, and services such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, smart home, office automation, virtual reality, and advanced data analytics, businesses can gain actionable insights about their customers and deliver the right products and services at the right time. To do this, data holds the key.

Driving Digital Transformation with Data

Even though digital transformation is operational, data is foundational to your success. 70% of a company’s mission-critical data comes from external sources that must be classified, encrypted, and delivered to get to the data-to-decisions lifecycle. The ability to obtain data, view it, visualize it, and use it can boost decision velocity, linked to faster innovation and higher competitiveness. Data is at the heart of digital change, and it aids customers in their journey.

When data is taken from these numerous sources and integrated into a single repository built on cloud-native applications, it undergoes the first transformation. As a result, data is cleansed, categorized, processed, aggregated, and placed into a single repository, which also contains similar data from the past. Master data management and data governance are required to deliver clean and integrated data. Data is converted into information, which is then transformed into insights. Organizations may now identify if any trends or patterns emerge from all the stored data because the one data repository also contains historical data. Organizations act on the insights that arise from the previous analysis. Therefore, the transformation of insights to imperatives or actionable insights is the final transformation that data undergoes, given the insights of what may or may not occur in the future.

Analytics may assist companies in developing multiple possibilities that will help them answer the question of what should be done next. From these options, they can choose a plan of action. This is the data value chain, and various analytics disciplines derive from this data value chain. Data governance, data management, data security, and data ethics are all analytics terms related to data. These disciplines necessitate a thorough understanding of what data is gathered, how it is acquired, how it is utilized, and who has access to it, as well as regulatory restrictions. Data handling companies are pressured to improve their performance in data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence—algorithms and machine learning aid diagnostic and predictive analytics. Recommendation engines aid prescriptive analytics.

Methodology

Turning data into value necessitates more than just data teams; it also necessitates fundamental culture shifts that embrace data-driven decision-making. Chief data officers must design digital and people strategies that make data available across the organization, allowing employees at all levels to use the right data at the right time. Building data literacy, showing the commercial value of data, fostering data-first teams with data-specific titles and skill sets, training everyone in the company to be data-driven decision-makers, and up-skilling can all help to stimulate the transition to a data-driven future. Getting data scientists, data engineers, and machine learning engineers up to speed on relevant tools, technologies, and methods, as well as equipping non-technical staff to collaborate more effectively with technical staff and leveraging the existing workforce’s in-depth domain expertise and understanding of the business, can increase employee retention by 40%.

Benefits of Digital Transformation

Each organization handles Digital Transformation differently, yet they all follow the same principles:

With the adoption of these principles, the companies success rate in implementing the Digital

Transformation increases phenomenally bringing in the following benefits:

Business Process Automation (BPA)

Most businesses now embrace automation as one of their technologies. Certain tasks are more suited to automation than others, so the organization must first figure out where it works and where it doesn’t. When there are repeated tasks, no monitoring is required, self-service solutions, statistics and computations, alerts and notifications, and changes of digital documents, BPA can be used.

Flexibility and Scalability

When internal operations are digital, it is easier to scale them up or down, optimizing the digital and physical components across all areas of the operating model. Instead of physically visiting a remote site, operations can be readily adjusted with the click of a button or slider.

Marketing a company’s brand image

Creating a company’s brand image and connecting with customers (both current and potential), partners, and other businesses enhance a company’s reputation and brand strength, complementing the marketing aspect.

Business Intelligence Systems

Enterprise software solutions that analyse data and translate it into insights used to make tactical and strategic choices are known as smart business intelligence systems. Data analytics, data mining, and centralized information storage are all features of BI services. They compile historical and present data and make prognostic predictions for the future.

Cloud Shift

Many businesses are rapidly growing their cloud use to enhance their connections with customers, employees, and partners. The cloud plays a role in digitization (the use of digital technologies to improve an organization’s operational excellence) and digital transformation (the use of digital technology to rapidly innovate and create new offerings). When it comes to harnessing the cloud’s transformative power, having a complete data strategy for collecting, storing, managing, sharing, and using data are essential. “What generates corporate value is data,” says the author. Cloud service paradigms such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS have all become commonplace in many businesses.

Data-driven Processes

Organizations that understand the value of data and its governance, have executive-level ownership and use enterprise data platforms and solutions to fully exploit the cloud to drive transformation fare well. The rise of sophisticated data platforms—end-to-end solutions for ingesting, evaluating, and acting on data generated by an organization’s systems, processes, and infrastructure—is assisting businesses in mastering the data problem. Data is managed and protected with a data platform, and the platform offers to control.

Customer focus

The focus on the demands of the consumer is at the heart of any business’s success, regardless of its industry. Individualized information that fulfils client expectations can be developed by businesses. Customer interaction is important at every stage of a company’s operations, including sales, marketing, and service, as well as product creation, supply chain management, human resources, IT, and finance. A customer-cantered firm distinguishes itself from one that just targets customers well by engaging with them at every stage where value is created. In these domains, customer involvement frequently leads to open collaboration, which accelerates innovation using online communities.

Predictive capabilities are brought to all functions via analytics insight, allowing all channels to be aligned around customer demands and preferences.

Customer Experience

Customers are the ones driving digital transformation because of changed expectations. Customers who are accustomed to everything being available on-demand, from food delivery to video and music, will abandon organizations that do not embrace digital transformation and cling to outdated technologies to deliver customer experiences.

Customer Reach

The digital and mobile revolution has also expanded the reach of businesses; many are now accessible to clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Prospects can conduct additional research on the internet to become better-informed shoppers. To make services available and communicate with prospects while conducting research, businesses must have a mobile and digital presence. Companies that have failed to embrace digital transformation and do not have a mobile or digital presence will be left behind.

Bottom Line

Companies that can make better judgments and enhance efficiencies to improve customer experience will typically get a return on their investment. All of this should result in more engaged customers, improved brand recognition and trust, increased profitability, and happier employees who will hopefully share in those gains.

Conclusion

Companies that adopt a data-driven culture see a fourfold increase in revenue and a fourfold increase in customer satisfaction. These are incredible results, and when you tap into the right data capabilities in that data culture, you tap into your unique potential for better anticipating and serving your customers. It’s all about being competitive and providing that first-class service. Transform your products, empower your personnel, and optimize your operations better than your competitors.

About Lluminant:

Lluminant Works has helped companies to transform their business processes by helping them adopt digital solutions under Data and Analytics domain. Please connect with us @ luminance@lluminantworks.com