Fast forward to 2020 and the digital economy is flourishing. How customers, suppliers, products and services are sought, influenced and constructed, has changed. Anything that can be digitized, is being digitized. However, simply digitizing existing products and services isn’t enough. It violates Porter’s and Rumelt’s philosophies.

A digital transformation strategy is a plan of action to reposition a business in the digital economy. Data allows us to find new opportunities much more easily. Building a business that can leverage emerging technology and ride new opportunities with speed skill and determination, often requires a transformed way of working.

Today ‘digital’ is the talk of a town. We hear about digital technologies, digital data, digital media, digital transformation, digital marketing. Everyone wants to go digital. But which way to go? And what is digital transformation and why having a digital transformation strategy is important?

Three Reasons Why Digital Transformation is Important

Digital technology has transformed the landscape of client engagement, commerce, marketing and more, in such a way that impacts every area of your business. Every company is now a technology company! This means managing your transition to a digitally driven business model isn’t just critical to beating competitors, it’s crucial to corporate survival. The top three reasons digital transformation is so important are:

Acceleration of Change – The pace of digital change is rising exponentially, making it very difficult to maintain a position of industry leadership, and requiring an acceleration of new digital solutions brought to market.
Digital Competition – Companies are under ever increasing pressure to compete digitally, and long established business models are being disrupted by “born digital” start-ups.
Customer Expectations – Customers expect a good experience across all touch points, you must ensure their interactions are seamless and exceptional.

At Sirius, we believe companies that embrace digital capabilities at the core of their corporate DNA and culture will not just survive, but thrive in the new economy. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digital transformation. Check out our Digital Transformation Overview to learn more and contact us to get started on your journey.
We know now that mobile is the future of everything. With the rise of the Internet of Things and mobile devices our lives and habits have clearly changed. Everything is now connected and if it’s not, it’s about to. We live in a world where you can connect your coffee machine to the Internet and make your coffee via Bluetooth. If your coffee machine can go online and you’re still only thinking about it, what does it say about you!

Go ‘digital’ or go home!

Digital transformation is often viewed as an implementation of digital technologies into all areas of business in order to build more sustainable relationships and better understand the needs of customers.
But this is just one of the ways to look at it. When talking about digital, we can think of discovering new frontiers and using innovation and technologies to push your business. It’s about finding new possibilities of an existing service in order to design and deliver a better experience for your customer. Some might argue it’s a new way of interacting with customers. None of these definitions is truer that the other but what we can all agree on is that today.

Here are the top 8 trends shaping digital transformation in 2021

• The digital-ready culture– Organizations are under greater pressure to digitize services quickly at scale to meet rising customer demands and create new revenue channels.
Consumers want consistent engagement with brands across their preferred channels. Seventy-three percent of shoppers use more than one channel during their shopping journey. Eighty-six percent of consumers say they want the ability to move between channels when talking to a brand. Ninty-two percent of customers are satisfied using live chat services — making it the support channel that leads to the highest customer satisfaction. And 78% of consumers use mobile devices to connect with brands for customer service — the number jumps to 90% of Millennials. Organizations need to invest in new digital methods of customer service.

• Democratization of innovation– Line of business users is trying to develop digital customer experiences faster. IT needs to drive cultural change by empowering the business to self-serve and deliver solutions quicker.
Enterprises will look to low code development tools to improve productivity. These trends are incredibly important for IT and CIOs — enabling and increasing technology savviness across lines-of-business is a key priority. Citizen integrator tools will reach mainstream adoption in the next 2 to 5 years.

• Composable enterprise– Hyper-specialization has created a groundswell of applications, leading organizations to shift to a composable enterprise to become more agile — where digital capabilities can be composed of existing applications using APIs, rather than being built from scratch every time.
Enterprises face application proliferation. There are around 8,000 apps in the marketing technology landscape alone. Fifty-two percent of organizations say that IT has generated the most business value by building reusable integration assets that save time and money on future projects.

• Automation– Organizations are using automation to drive operational efficiency and improve business processes. APIs are key to driving automation and scaling productivity.
Automation is top of mind to enable innovation. Per Salesforce, 81% of IT organizations will automate more tasks to allow team members to focus on innovation over the next 12 months to 18 months. McKinsey notes 57% of organizations say they are at least piloting automation of processes in one or more business units or functions. MuleSoft research found 30% of IT decision-makers say that automation is a key business initiative tied to digital transformation.

• API security- The average enterprise has 900 applications. The proliferation of new endpoints creates new avenues for intrusion, requiring robust API security.
Eighty-four percent of customers are more loyal to companies that have strong security controls. Security is also a top enterprise technology investment. API abuses will be the most-frequent attack vector for enterprise web applications data breaches.

• Microservices– Organizations are turning to microservices to rapidly build new customer experiences. Companies deploying microservices to production will require some form of service mesh capabilities to scale.
Microservices expose data and functionality as a collection of loosely coupled services. With microservices, organizations can quickly adapt to changing customer requests and demands, as well as offer services that create a competitive edge.” Ninety-one percent of organizations are using or plan to use microservices.

• The data divide– To keep pace with evolving customer expectations, organizations are looking for faster ways to unlock data and gain insights. 2021 will be the year that data separates organizations from their competitors and customers — the ability to unlock, analyze, and act on data will become foundational to growth. Businesses aren’t living up to customer expectations of seamless and personalized experiences.

• Data analytics- Organizations are investing in data analytics to transform customer experiences. The value of data analytics will be dependent on the data they are fed.
A well-developed and designed enterprise data analytics effort enables us to deliver a superior customer experience. An important 2020 lesson is that every business must be a digital business. And in the next normal, every business must be able to create value at the speed of need. The future of business will be automated and autonomous. The future of the enterprise is an autonomous enterprise. There are numerous customer case studies in the Salesforce MuleSoft Connectivity benchmark report and the 2021 digital transformation trends report.

References:

Three Reasons Why Digital Transformation is Important

https://perfectial.com/blog/digital-transformation-strategy/
https://perfectial.com/services/digital-transformation/

Digital Transformation Strategy

https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-8-trends-shaping-digital-transformation-in-2021/