Digital business acceleration is imperative in a competitive world

Covid-19 fundamentally changed the way organizations work. Faced with disruption, organizations rapidly adopted new business models to meet evolving customer aspirations.

It was an enforced change imposed by an unforeseen pandemic, but that change is here to stay. Recovery may be on the horizon, but organizations have realized through this experience that they need to build even more resilient businesses than ever before to cope with future stressors.

The pandemic is said to have accelerated digital business transformation by months and, in some cases, even years. Consider some of the runaway winners in this pandemic: Amazon, Zoom, Slack, Netflix, or Apple. These were all organizations that adapted digital early and were able to capitalize enough to create new customer experience benchmarks.

Learning from these early adopters of digital transformation, we can identify what I call the three layers of digital business transformation,

• Data-powered product innovation
• Using artificial intelligence for efficient IT and infrastructure operations or AIOps to drive that innovation
• Maximized front-end customer experiences and revenue generation through streamlined RevOps

Real process efficiency and true digital business acceleration will be realized only when these three principles of innovation, AIOps, and RevOps, are connected and operating cohesively with a common thread of data.

To achieve their business goals, they have to strategize detailed roadmaps on integrating the different layers of product, AIOps, and RevOps. The efficiency, output, resilience, and eventual sustainability of these three layers will be the key to the long-term success of digital business products.

Creating a data-based ecosystem for constant product innovation

We have heard this phrase a lot in 2021 “product-led innovation and growth”, if you look closely, you will see that an organization’s success in this post-Covid era depends on the maturity of its approach to product innovation.

Mature organizations view their products and offerings as long-term digital assets that evolve across a lifecycle curve and build a culture of pragmatic data-driven innovation.

New product build, new features, and functionality are incremental steps on the overall innovation journey. You need to combine these steps with breakthrough innovation and create new opportunities for product-led growth and new product concepts.

Break your data and information siloes. Your organization’s infrastructure and the customer-facing layers are hiding troves of data on product usage, availability, and experience. You need to set up systems to continuously mine this data and plug these insights into a continuous product innovation cycle.

Combining these with the right team and offering your talent the environment to excel is critical. Let your data empower you to think of how your product can deliver long-term growth and how your customers can use it in optimal ways for maximum experience.

Enabling infrastructure resiliency through cloud transformation

Digital enablers such as AI, ML, and cloud were the keys to creating accelerated customer-driven digital businesses during this pandemic. Cloud has emerged as the core foundation to acquiring and building AI capabilities. AIOps promises to take on some of the most challenging IT issues structurally.

But the first step is to make a meaningful assessment of existing IT infrastructure, including legacy systems, and then use AIOps strategically. You will need to overhaul or modify your legacy systems to leverage AI/ML Ops.

Think beyond traditional IT service management restricted to the back-office, and embrace enterprise service management that brings front-office data and processes to the table. Historically, it has been a challenge for organizations to create a connected ecosystem of front-end and back-end technologies.

But imagine the experience of an online buyer when the payment gateway doesn’t work because the back-end is not robust. Today, when front-end digital touchpoints have become critical for business, you must design infrastructure for that goal and make the back-end ubiquitous.

Most successful digital leaders are swiftly moving toward invisible infrastructure. And AIOps is the stepping stone towards NoOps. Also, integrating AI/ML with DevOps and DevSecOps is a crucial step in this transformation, ensuring more efficient workflow and alleviating some of DevOps’ operational complexities.

Converging all the data points with RevOps

RevOps has become more data-driven than ever before - more complex as customers have evolved. The service economy and the experience economy are passé. Today, we are in the attention economy. To win your customers’ attention at the right moment with the right message, you need data and speed to use that data.

The growing importance of the cloud that I have spoken about earlier, even in AIOps, enables edge computing and instant access to insights. Your systems, machines(bots), and people can use these insights to create a seamless customer experience across their product journey.

The pandemic has changed the speed and scale of digital business acceleration forever. It has shown how technology needs to meet data with revenue in one connected ecosystem. It is the only way to future-proof your organization as it meets tomorrow’s new digital challenges.

This article has been written by Vivian Gomes, CMO, CSS Corp