The Value of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation solutions are leveraged by companies to create new or modernize existing business processes by using digital technologies with an aim to meet evolving market requirements. It is the use of new, fast, and dynamic digital technology in order to solve business problems.

Importance Of Digital Transformation Solutions

Digital transformation solutions helps companies digitize major processes, often resulting in them going paperless. This can positively impact individual businesses as well as society as a whole. With digitized information comes simplified operations, allowing businesses to adopt new technologies, new ideas, and new ways of adding value to their services.

Elements of digital transformation include:

• Better customer experience
• Operational agility
• Enhanced culture & leadership
• Workforce enablement
• Digital technology integration

Best Digital transformation allows companies to approach sales, marketing, and customer service through the lens of social media and the Internet. This leads to the adoption of a customer-based approach that focuses on digital advertising, marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.

While digital transformation is undoubtedly beneficial in the long term, organizations might face the following challenges during or shortly after implementation:

• Difficulty in replacing legacy technologies
• Lack of personnel with necessary technical qualifications
• Need for major upheaval in resource allocation

Technology is an important element of digital transformation—at its core, the process focuses on ousting outdated technology. After undergoing successful digital transformation, a business can use more sophisticated technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced neural machine learning (ML) techniques.

Top Importance of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a prime example of the adage, ‘change is the only constant.’ The exponential growth of digital innovation and the staggering number of new technologies—such as smartphones, social media, IoT, artificial intelligence, Big Data analytics, managed services, 3D printing, virtual reality, live streaming, and autonomous vehicles—have enabled the creation of digital business models in numerous industries.

Implementation of Digital Transformation

While digital transformation might sound like a simple task theoretically, putting it into action is not necessarily easy. In practice, digital transformation involves taking proactive measures for the incorporation of digital technologies into daily business operations. This often translates to making ‘uncomfortable’ changes in business processes as well as reconsidering business solutions that have worked great for the company in the past. Digital transformation moves technology to the center of business operations and turns IT into a critical component of corporate strategy.

The core IT areas that can aid in the implementation of digital transformation are as follows:

Internet of Things

No digital platform is complete without having the capacity to connect, exchange data, and interact with a network of ‘things’ such as vehicles, devices, appliances, drones, electronics, connectivity equipment, and actuators.

Microservices

Microservices are a technique for software development in which modular fine-grained services are built to expertly execute a specific activity each. Business capabilities are considered when organizing these services. Microservices are independently deployable, scalable, upgradable, replaceable, and fault-tolerant, and run in a single process. They operate on the assumption that the output of each service is the input for another service. Microservices allow for the agile development of new business applications.

API Management

A key aspect of digital transformation is an API (Application Programming Interface) environment. APIs are components that allow service providers to digitally interact with both external and internal customers. API management platforms let users rapidly create digital assets, laying the foundation for a complete digital business ecosystem.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

When a business adopts multiple digital technologies, security can become a challenge. The efficient authorization and authentication of each and every device requires a platform for SSO (Single Sign-On) and identity federation with end-to-end support for robust and adaptive authentication. With IAM solutions, businesses can secure access to endpoints and applications, federate identities, and bridge identity protocols across cloud and on-premise environments.

Analytics and Events Stream Processor

Digital transformation brings with it added advantages for employers, such as being able to keep a record of employee activities with ease, define metrics, make data-driven business decisions, and measure success. With Analytics and Events Stream Processors, enterprises gain access to intelligent, real-time, and actionable business insights. Stream processors enable the collection of events in multiple formats and through multiple transports. They make use of streaming SQL (Structured Query Language) to detect complex events, process streams, make predictions using ML (Machine Learning) models, and calculate time-based aggregations.

Middleware

Users can make enterprise data more accessible through integration middleware that is optimized for centralized as well as decentralized ESBs (Enterprise Service Bus). Such solutions integrate data, digital services, proprietary & legacy systems, and SaaS applications, and enable more efficient creation of system integrations.

How to Optimize Digital Transformation?

Users beginning their digital transformation journeys and leveraging the above core IT technologies may be able to quicken the results of their transformation efforts by considering the following steps:

Implementation of a ‘cloud first’ IT strategy that provides fault-tolerance, scalability, security, cost-saving, productivity, and reliability

Making use of an open standards, open-source middleware platform that leverages the core technologies mentioned above, reducing the chances of being locked into costly proprietary solutions

Unburdening IT teams of their reactive responsibilities by using automation and managed services in order to reduce operational costs

Adopt DevOps and Agile Development to address dynamic business demands and enable quicker delivery time to market

Takeaway

There lies tremendous value in implementing the right combination of processes and solutions during digital transformation to meet long-term technological needs of organizations. Through effective digital transformation, users can create an agile enterprise that responds rapidly to changing competitive conditions, guards against disruption, and ultimately achieves succes