Digital Transformation: The Ultimate Quick Start Guide

What is Digital Transformation?

For over a quarter of a century, organizations have been transforming the processes and strategies behind their operations, and even the nature of their products, to incorporate digital technology. In a highly competitive business environment, they have little choice but to do so in order to engage and serve both their clients and their workforce.

Digital transformation is usually an extensive undertaking. It entails an examination of an organization’s entire workflow, its supply chains, and organizational structure—from employee skill sets to organizational charts. Many facets are reinvented, including the manner in which the organization interacts with its clients and suppliers, and all must be examined in terms of their value proposition to a company’s stakeholders.

Software development practices are also evolving, and organizations are transitioning to a DevOps paradigm, with close cooperation between developers and operations teams to achieve fast, user-centric development focused on business results.

Successfully done, digital transformation yields ongoing business benefits. Digital processes and technologies facilitate improved response to the demands of an increasingly digital-first customer base, and enables swifter adaptation to the evolving demands as the business environment develops. It produces an infrastructure and workforce with capabilities that contribute to a company’s competitive edge.

Why is Digital Transformation Important?

In the past, running a business only required people, process, and physical infrastructure like offices or factories. Today, an array of technological tools exist to administer those employees, their physical infrastructure, and their processes. Here are a few ways integration of digital technology can benefit your business.

Faster Decision Making

Any key performance indicator (KPI) that is important for business decisions must be readily available—you must be able to accrue the data and rapidly analyze it, comparing your statistics with standard benchmarks or goals. This ensures that all functional roles are operating in accordance with business requirements and objectives.

During a transformation initiative, you will be able to track metrics by leveraging your new digital capabilities. Based on these metrics, you will refine your digitization plans and procedures, resulting in improved business outcomes, and in the bottom line, growth in revenue and profitability.

In addition, by applying data-driven insights and analysis, you will be able to better understand your customers and immediately make optimal decisions based on their behavior.

Collaboration

The digitized world has connected people across global regions and provided them with access to information in ways that were never before possible. Communication has become so seamless that organizations can start thinking of teams and organizational units as a unified whole, rather than a group of individuals.

Taking this into the workplace, a company’s digital transformation will be more successful if it includes strengthening communication and collaboration between teams and employees.

Socio-economic barriers, age differences, even gender biases break down when communication fosters dialogue, shared learning experiences, and grows motivation.

Improved Customer Experience

New digital technologies, social media, and smartphones have become almost synonymous with the desire for an improved lifestyle. Consumers have come to expect instant gratification and immediate solutions for day to day problems.

Consequently, new technologies often exist with one sole purpose: to improve the user’s experience. Suddenly, cutting-edge technology has become its own end, and digital transformation aims to boost customer satisfaction through:

• Design and digitization of the client journey
• Development and strengthening of the information base
• Incorporation of the customer into the business automation journey

By supplying a satisfying digital experience, the company shows its technological savviness, and leadership positioning, and gains customer trust and respect.

Core Digital Transformation Technologies

Several technologies are critical to the digital transformation process:

Cloud computing—provides businesses with swifter access to its software and data, along with immediate updates and increased functionality. These capabilities can be accessed from any location at any time.

• Mobile platforms—remove the limitations of time and place from the work paradigm.
• Automation—frees humans to execute higher added-value tasks. Mundane repetitive tasks are performed, faster and with fewer errors, by robotic process automation (RPA) or other automation technologies.
• Information technology as a commodity—frees a company from being responsible for its entire technology stack, enabling it to focus on customizing its information technology systems to better serve its needs and differentiate it from its competitors.
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence—provide organizations with the insights required for making faster and more precise decisions driven by algorithms with true cognitive capabilities.
• Other emerging transformational technologies—including blockchain, augmented and virtual reality, the internet of things (IoT), edge computing, and social media, promote business efficiency and responsiveness.

What Areas of Your Business Will Be Affected by Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is typically applied for the purpose of helping organizations become more efficient. However, a successful digital transformation can often become a complex operation. There are four main areas involved in the transformation, including technology, data, process, and cultural or organizational transformation. The four must work together to ensure true efficiency and the flexibility needed for future modification.

Technology

Digital transformation typically involves a shift from traditional, legacy technology to new, more scalable technologies. A monolithic application, for example, can be re-architected into a scalable cloud-native containerized application. However, all components of the organization should be made to work together, and this is often a complex process that requires a high level of expertise.

Data

Data is a fundamental resource. If handled well, it can yield actionable insights that can improve a wide range of areas. You can use data to increase sales, improve efficiency, and create better relationships with customers, for example. However, to truly utilize data and turn it into insights, organizations need to create pipelines that result in high data quality and analytics. This often requires an investment in time and talent.

Process

Digital transformation, ideally, should take into account all relevant processes and design interconnected pipelines that introduce a greater level of flexibility, scalability, and collaboration. This often requires a change in hierarchy, and the adoption of agile concepts. Once agile pipelines are adopted, organizations can break through silos and improve efficiency.

Cultural/Organizational Transformation

A new process relies on people. Any process you create should help support the employees and stakeholders of the organization. In some cases, this means a shift in culture—and then employees are asked to adopt the change. In other cases, this means keeping an old piece of tech to maintain consistency. An organizational transformation should work on a balance that considers all aspects of the organization, including the needs of human resources.

Digital Transformation in Business Sectors

Digital transformation is inevitable when promoting customer loyalty and retention, and increasing value in general. Here are a few primary business sectors deeply affected by digital transformation.

Digital Transformation in Supply Chain, Procurement and Manufacturing

According to Gartner, supply chain and manufacturing companies must “look to innovative technologies that have the potential to disrupt supply chain operating models.” Today’s supply chains and manufacturing procedures require centralized visibility over everything—from the raw materials to the end-user—that only digital transformation can provide.

Digital Transformation in HR

The post-pandemic workplace has little resemblance to a mid-20th century office floor. All stages of the HR process, from evaluation and recruitment, through onboarding, training, and performance management, are performed through digital means. Remote work via digital technology is now the norm.

Digital Transformation in Banking

Financial planning and credit management are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to financial services. Customization, hyper-personalized services, mobile functionality, and free remote access to banking services are now expected by customers in all markets. In addition, blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the manner in which value is communicated.

Digital Transformation in IT

Traditionally-structured IT departments are finding it difficult to meet the needs of a modern digital enterprise. New cloud services are an alternative to old-school IT, giving rise to shadow IT, or unauthorized usage of external services by employees. Instead, IT must itself undergo digital transformation, enabling the organization to utilize cloud services and modern technologies in an agile manner, while taking responsibility for security and governance.

Digital Transformation with Perception Point

As work from home and BYOD trends become key to workers increasing their productivity, they also open your business up to IT and security risks. With Perception Point, corporate data are fully protected, so your team can work wherever it suits them, and on the device of their choice — a key feature of all successful digital transformations.

While going through a digital transformation process, businesses need to focus on processes that help their teams to work more quickly, and more effectively. Perception Point supports digital transformation at scale by providing enterprise-grade security to protect email, browsers, cloud collaboration platforms and proprietary apps from all types of cyberattacks.

An all-included managed Incident Response service is available for all customers 24/7. Perception Point’s team of cybersecurity experts will manage incidents, provide analysis and reporting, and optimize detection on-the-fly. The service drastically minimizes the need for internal IT or SOC team resources, reducing the time required to react and mitigate web-borne attacks by up to 75%.

Customers deploying the solution will experience fewer breaches, while providing their users with a better experience as they have the freedom to browse the web, use SaaS applications that they require, and access privileged corporate data, confidently, securely, and without added latency.

Contact us for a demo of our Advanced Threat Prevention solutions, today.