The 5 enablers of digital transformation

Virender Jeet

Digitization is upon us and enterprises are grappling to keep pace with the torrent of change. With the success of digital companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, GroupOn and most recently Airbnb and Alibaba, most business leaders have acknowledged the impact that digitization will have on the future.

Buoyed by advancements in digital technologies like social, mobile, real-time business intelligence and analytics, and cloud (SMAC), the industry is shifting from individual technologies to delivering integrated solutions that empower business enterprises.

Listed below are the SMAC trends that are enabling digital transformation.

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics:

The scope of analytics has evolved from being a reporting tool to exploring and understanding the minds of customers. This is one of the hottest software growth markets in India, and is ushering in a fact-based decision making approach to support sales effectiveness.

Predictive analytics solutions are having a very positive impact on B2B sales pipelines and improving lead and opportunity conversion levels. BI and analytics will be great transformation tools to enable enterprises and reduce chronic uncertainties in B2B sales cycles.

Mobility:

One upon a time, the BYOD culture was all the rage and it redefined the enterprise mobility landscape. The next big step will be setting up of a unified enterprise mobility platform by using cloud technologies which will enable greater collaboration, enhance portability and ensure real time data capturing.

This will also be a huge opportunity to reduce costs by taking advantage of the drastic fall in the cost of ownership of smart mobile devices and data plan prices. There is definitely potential there to transform many business models.

Cloud computing:

The cloud is to the 21st century, what mobile was to the 20th. The possibilities for driving operational excellence are enormous.

Although enterprises in India are still tentative, they are quickly warming up to the idea, seeing the obvious cost and productivity benefits. With the emergence of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings provided by leading cloud service providers, it gives affordable options to enterprises of all sizes to take the advantages that the cloud so obviously offers.

Cloud and mobility will converge more in the coming year. This symbiotic relationship will enable enterprises to leverage cloud services and create custom solutions for employees to work and collaborate better in the mobility space. This means creation of a unified platform and giving users the flexibility to work on their mobile devices, agnostic of device type or platform.

Social media:

Social media has witnessed exponential growth and enterprises have been able to get on board by integrating it with their CRMs.

Social media has brought a paradigm shift in the way companies talk to their customers and thereby, customers have been empowered like never before. Social media will continue to play a pivotal role and its presence will only increase with the government sector using it as an active part of their governance and communication strategies to deliver better services to citizens.

The Internet of things (IoT):

The real giant stride in IoT will be integrating embedded hardware, software, actuators and sensors that can track, optimize, predict and actuate.

What this means is we will begin to live and experience the power on the Internet in more tangible ways than ever before. Security and privacy of data will be important once IoT becomes more pervasive, but before that happens, there need to be greater cross-industry collaboration (although some of that has already begun) to understand and fulfil the potential of something this powerful and disruptive.

Enterprises need to take a proactive approach and integrate SMAC technologies in their solution offerings, like built in social collaboration capabilities, building a unified mobile platform, improving sales cycles via predictive analytics or using a cloud-based delivery model for all products. This will give them a foothold into the future; allow them to scale up gradually and provide the agility to face the challenges of the current market.

The article is authored by Virender Jeet – Sr. VP Technology, Newgen Software, and opinions expressed are his own