The business world is ruthless and unforgiving. Business firms have always needed to keep up with the latest innovations and technology in order to remain competitive and deliver the best product or service to the consumer. For the last ten years, companies have looked to digital transformation to give themselves an edge over their competitors.
What is digital transformation? Digital transformation is an endeavour undertaken by companies to incorporate digital technologies into their everyday operations, such as sales, marketing, human resources, and management. Digital systems—as opposed to analogue ones—are fast and nimble, allowing an organisation to quickly adjust to unexpected supply chain disruptions, sudden market pressures, and erratic customer expectations.
But while hitherto, digital transformation has been seen mainly as a means to increase efficiency and accessibility, recent developments in the tech industry have changed such a view. Some modern technologies are so powerful that a failure to integrate them into your company’s operations may handicap you.
These are the technologies that are powering widespread enterprise digital transformation across all sectors of the economy. They have almost made such a transformation mandatory, with early adopters likely to gain significant advantages and late entrants at risk of being permanently left behind.
Artificial Intelligence
In business, artificial intelligence simply means the use of intelligent computer software capable of processing and analysing vast amounts of data to improve business processes. AI can help in all sorts of areas, including but not limited to: raising revenue, improving customer experience, personalising marketing, and increasing productivity.
In fact, AI is so powerful that, according to a report by Accenture, it will increase global productivity by 40%! "AI is no longer a 'nice to have' or a set of cool tools to impress management," states Accenture. "AI and data strategies are becoming the very core of business." The
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to any network of physical objects—things—embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies. These "smart" objects connect with each other on a shared network and exchange data to perform useful tasks. According to a report by the Harvard Business Review, few
emerging technologies offer more transformative potential for forward-thinking companies than the Internet of Things. The reason: it combines sensors and sophisticated software analytics to process large volumes of operational data. IoT applications can create new efficiencies in manufacturing, improve quality control, track physical assets, be used in wearables for human health analytics, and enable business process change.
Companies are beginning to see the many benefits of integrating this technology into their businesses. The increased bandwidth speed enabled by the rapid adoption of 5G—up to 100 times faster than 4G—will allow IoT solutions to become much more powerful, so this technology can yet grow much further.
Automation
Perhaps the first technology a digital transformation company will look to integrate is automation—its benefits are immediately obvious. It refers to the process by which business experts encode the models of business processes to create a finished application or piece of software that performs repetitive tasks. This allows human employees to step away from low-impact routine tasks and focus on higher-value work.
The Gartner report states that "hyper automation" is "a state in which organisations use a combination of AI and ML to rapidly identify and automate all possible business processes." They project that robotic process automation (RPA) will grow by 40% year over year.
More and more companies are utilising automation for production and manufacturing. The developments in this field have allowed the integration of robotics and machine-to-machine collaboration, allowing many laborious tasks to be completely free of human involvement.
Blockchain
Finally, blockchain is perhaps the newest technology on this list. Although the blockchain can be complicated, the core concept is simple: it is merely a decentralised database.
First developed in the creation of Bitcoin, the uses of blockchain extend beyond cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology gives companies the ability to use a secure distributed ledger for all manner of purposes.
According to Investopedia, "a distributed ledger" is a database that is consensually shared and synchronised across multiple sites, institutions, or geographies, accessible by multiple people. It allows transactions to have public "witnesses."
Companies can have their contracts, transactions, financing, record keeping, and more stored and secured. A use-case that merits special highlighting is supply chain management. Most systems in a supply chain are composed of separate databases whose records are kept centrally. This can make acquiring verifiable information about shipments and consignments nearly impossible for the person tasked with supply chain management. Blockchain, as you can probably guess, can help enormously with the management of supply chains.
With the indisputable potential these new technologies show, and the exciting innovations sure to come in the near future as they evolve further, companies may fall behind if they’re not pursuing digital transformation with urgency and weight. It is no coincidence that companies that have gone furthest in the integration of such technologies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix—are the biggest companies in the world. If an organisation wants to scale up to a higher level, digital transformation is key.
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