To continue to build on the success of digitization, organizations will need to embrace the true capability of cloud as well as allied technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Across the world, many organizations started their journey towards digital transformation in the second half of the last decade. Anecdotal observations suggest that with the outbreak of COVID-19, these early adopters were able to ensure business continuity within their organizations and continued to forge forward with sustained, and in some cases improved, employee productivity and/ or business growth. This response in face of an unprecedented crisis was almost testament of the business resilience that digital transformation can ensure.
The pandemic has been one of the biggest disruptors in the recent history with a multitude of industries pivoting their operations and jumping into the deep end of digitalization. ‘Pivot or perish’ became the mantra in face of the crisis and to respond to the immediate challenges, organizations prioritized digital enablement to find new and efficient ways of working remotely. The cloud-powered digitization ensured remote and secure access to business applications and data as well as collaborative equity amongst a geographically distributed workforce.
Next wave of hyper-digitalization
Cloud computing played a key role in helping organizations cope up with the pandemic last year and has now set the ground for the next wave of ‘hyper-digitalization’.
Digital Workplace
Digital enterprises were able to maintain employee productivity and operational efficiency throughout the pandemic that necessitated remote working on an unprecedented scale. A digital workplace helps sustain technology currency, offers consistent user experience for employees across devices and locations, and enables unbridled collaboration with a productivity boost.
Businesses will now need to adopt evolved digital and hybrid workplace models to enable comprehensive workforce transformation and improve operational efficiency to meet organizational goals. Organizations will need to make long-term investments in workplace transformation, reimagine business processes, and take cognizance of workplace insights to enable digital parity across the board.
Customer Experience
Organizations will also have to work towards offering superior customer experience in a remote or hybrid environment. In the recent past, the significant demographic shift has had a profound effect on customer behaviour. The digital natives and millennials have starkly different expectations from customers of previous generations –contextualized and relevant interactions are not a bonus, but a mainstream expectation.
Hyper-personalization, done by creating custom and targeted experiences using data, analytics, AI, and automation, allows brands to tailor their marketing and communication to individual customers. Traditionally, organizations have used customer segmentation as part of their marketing strategy, but hyper-personalization delivers optimal results by allowing companies to tailor their marketing efforts for the ‘segment-of-one’. It allows organizations to improve customer experience by meaningfully engaging customers and deepening existing relationships or building new ones as well as drive brand loyalty and willingness to spend.
Business Resilience
Since cloud services are built on a resilient infrastructure, there is an assurance of high availability of these services. For example, if an enterprise subscribes to a cloud storage service, it need not worry about how the data is bring replicated or deployed across different data centres. The service offers a certain availability percentage and that’s that. Of course, there are additional tools to facilitate multi-location deployment or real-time replication to enhance the resiliency further, but even from the get-go, resiliency is a core tenet of the cloud.
There is also a need to build resiliency by enabling an organization to scale its digital environment as per market demands as well as use digital tools and systems to quickly recover from or adjust to any crisis or external impediments. Local stores adopting digital platforms for customer engagement or small and medium businesses signing up for SaaS offerings to transform business processes along with the acceleration of e-commerce or building intelligence and automation at the core of manufacturing and supply chain operations are some of the examples of hyper-digitization that can ensure business continuity and organizational resilience.
Summary
The cloud-powered transformation of businesses enables increased operational efficiencies by maximizing the potential of cloud as well as integrating other emerging technologies. Digitization can help businesses transform and diversify their product or service offerings and enhance customer experience for better growth potential.
A strategic embrace of cloud can also drive accelerated innovation and greater agility while being a catalyst for overall digital transformation.
To continue to build on the success of digitization, organizations will need to embrace the true capability of cloud as well as allied technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Essentially, the pandemic-driven digitization is only a foundation for continued march towards all-encompassing digital transformation of organizations across the industries.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Narsimha Rao Mannepalli
Quelle/Source: ET CIO, 11.08.2021
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