Accelerating digital transformation, the process of integrating digital technologies into all aspects of a business to meet the market and changing business requirements, with the aim to increase the effectiveness of business operations and customer relations, requires organisations to update their systems, processes, organisations and culture.

Successful digital transformation can be achieved via company-wide alignment, design thinking and adoption of the leading edge technologies.

Increasing competition means that digital transformation can provide powerful leverage for companies as they aim to stay relevant.  For example, the retail transformation, triggered by the rise of e-commerce, forced thousands of companies who failed to adapt to e-commerce as a retailer, out of business.  Past advancements, from personal computers, the internet, mobile technology, social media and through to recent advances in AI, are all such important technological innovations that have all caused slow adapters to fail previously.

The steps to successful digital transformation (DX) require a well designed framework that will guide you through your DX journey.

Each organisation is different, with different needs and has a slightly different set of transition targets and a crucial step towards organisational synergy is to determine the current level of digitisation and try to align that with long-term digital goals.

Setting clear objectives and developing a feasible plan which selects areas for improvement and starting to integrate digital systems in a step-by-step process will help ensure a successful implementation.

Enablers such as IoT, Analytics, Cloud, VR, and AI are a vital driver for a successful digital transformation. Organisations should undertake research to decide which enabler would be the best fit and leveraging open source technologies can be a major enabler for corporations.

Establishing competent technology leadership, training staff and integrating a digital culture will help staff adapt to change easier and mean the business is better connected and responsive across departments so that employees return quickly to changing customers’ needs.

Trending Technologies In Digital Transformation

Digital transformation trends that businesses can leverage to ensure they are positioned for future success include:

Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows business’ to automate a variety of repetitive back-office tasks to achieve improved operational efficiency including:

• Data entry
• Data extraction
• Data updates
• Data validation
• Invoice processing
• Payroll automation
• Periodic report preparation

According to Gartner, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market. And as of 2021, the popularity of RPA has not declined and businesses are continuing to adopt RPA software to leverage the power of automation in various use cases.

Cloud Technologies (Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud)

As a result of the increasing volume of data, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise solutions on the cloud are getting more popular among businesses. Cloud solutions address the need for scalability so that there isn’t a need to transfer data between systems as the business grows and along with scalability benefits, cloud technologies can also provide compliance with privacy and security regulations.

Edge Computing and IoT

There are already a range of successful IoT use-cases, such as predictive maintenance or monitoring, however advances in edge computing and analytics are now enabling businesses to invest in IoT and edge analytics more. 

Businesses should benefit from these two technologies when rapid changes and late responses to the change in the business environment can significantly harm productivity or conditions, where data should be collected, are not suitable for human measurement.

Process Mining

Companies can use process mining for faster and more accurate analysis of their processes.  Automation provides faster and lower-cost solutions. However, companies need to examine their processes to use automation tools efficiently. 

Prioritising bottlenecks to resolve is valuable but has always been a struggle for businesses. 

Process mining technology allows companies to mine processes to find those bottlenecks and boost process performance in areas such as identifying drivers that hurt monthly revenue, root causes of changes to orders leading to rework or discovering manual processes to automate.

Task Mining

Task mining technology monitors user interaction data by using technologies like screen capture anc can help businesses understand how tasks are being handled. By combining this technology with process mining, businesses can better understand their processes and take specific actions toward process improvement.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence technology can empower most of the digital technologies listed above due to its capability to process data at scale. However, in the context of digital transformation, deploying AI mostly means deploying one of the following technologies:

• Analytics: The process of collecting and analysing data to gain insights. AI is embedded in different tools in different industries. (Eg. Sales, Marketing, HR). The process of using AI that is embedded in different tools across industries including Sales, Marketing, HR etc, to analyse data and gain insights.
• Conversational AI: The use of chatbots provide innovative AI driven solutions to improve customer service along with other benefits.
• Autonomous Things (AuT): AuT are machines that function on specific tasks autonomously without human interaction thanks to AI algorithms such as computer vision. There are three types of Autonomous Things, Self-driving cars, Drones and Robotics.
• Digital Twins: Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical entities such as devices, people, processes, or systems that help businesses make model-driven decisions. Manufacturing, healthcare, supply chain, construction and retail are main industries where we encounter digital twin applications.

While some companies are still talking about digital transformation, a new transformation is already underway: AI transformation. With the rise of deep learning and most major tech companies claiming to be AI-first, it is clear that AI will further create major opportunities for business.

Like digitization, AI has the potential to transform both back and front office capabilities, making it more efficient and effective. Companies should not pass the opportunity to embed AI into their decision-making systems as part of their digital transformation.

Broad Value For Digital Transformation Across Industry

Digital transformation will become critical for business success across a broad industry scope including:

Healthcare

Digital transformation in healthcare can lead to improved patient care resulting from digital technologies that assist doctors and while reducing operation costs.  MedTech and healthtech companies are technology providers and can enable digital transformation and serve digitally savvy companies. Increased digital transformation increases their addressable market.

Pharmaceutical companies can use digital technologies that enable them to collect and share data for research purposes and facilitate personalised care.

Retail

Retailers could focus on three key aspects of digital transformation in:

• Customer experience: A key factor for a business to differentiate from its competitors.
• Enterprise agility: Launching Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) with quick decision making and iteration.
• Operational cost reduction: With analytics, businesses can reduce their operational costs in areas such as supply chain.

Financial Services

Digital transformation offers banks automation opportunities and digital banking products that enable secure and frictionless customer journeys.  Financial services mostly deal with structured quantitative data which makes it easier to digitise and automate processes. 

Banks can ramp up their digital transformation efforts and adopt technologies such as machine learning, automation and blockchain.

Real Estate

To remain competitive under increased competition, real estate companies could explore new structuring options, improve operational performance and optimise portfolios to get maximum ROI.  With the adoption of digital technologies, real estate players such as developers, brokers, agents, investors, or managers can utilise numerous applications such as virtual tours, automated transactions and personalised services where digital technologies enhance the home buying experience while improving operational efficiency in the real estate industry to meet evolving customer demands.

Insurance

New players, business models and demanding customers are forcing the insurance industry to adopt digital technologies.

As competitors rapidly deploy new solutions, insurers need to leverage the latest in digital to have agility in their data management and other systems in order to remain competitive.

The insurance industry can leverage digital transformation use cases in areas including automation, claims processing, claim fraud detection, risk reduction, omnichannel and smart contracts to improve customer experience and deliver a performance ROI.

The Future of Digital Transformation for your Business

At Baibi, we help to implement the mechanisms to integrate with your existing systems and use automation, AI and business intelligence data to discover these ever-valuable opportunities and use decision intelligence to drive value enhancement.  Baibi provides a way to connect, analyse and report on the data that your business has been missing.