Key Digital Transformation Trends Shopping the Future

Digital transformation is a buzz word in today’s techno-savvy enterprises. The unprecedented expansion of technology-based solutions has fueled the growth of the organizations in the last couple of years. And, in the future, the ability of the businesses to leverage from the technology will be a key parameter to decide about their survival. Therefore, leaders and stakeholders across different sectors are now considering technological elevation as a priority and utilize it for streamlining business operations in the future.

Emerging technology trends stir competitiveness and push businesses to go beyond their comfort zone and think about becoming more information technology-friendly.

• 70% of organizations have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working out to implement it.
• Four out of five Information Technology professionals think that digital transformation is a NECESSITY for the survival of any business. (A report from Masergy)
• Gartner predicted that the organizations that are digitally trustworthy will generate 20% more online revenue as compared to other organizations lacking digitization.
• In terms of C-suites, 28% of CIOs and 23% of CEOs are either owing or promoting digital transformation initiatives for their organization.

And the facts continue to grow with each passing day. It proves how organizations think about investing in digitization at present.

In this stage where the enterprises are on the brink of the industrial revolution, for chief digital officers and technology decision-makers, it’s more than a curiosity to find out what the future holds. They must invest and apply digital technologies in the right way to let the business agile and competitive.

Well, prediction about what will be the future of digital transformation isn’t easy. There is no such cut and a dry statement that would get you through the future of digitization. But, the 2020 trends are surrounded by the idea of “People-centric smart spaces”. This means, in the future, it will be important to validate how technology will affect PEOPLE, i.e. customers, employees, business processes, and so on. So, what the future holds for the enterprises when it comes to digital transformation? Let’s find out more.

The organizations that manage to win the customer experience and establish a meaningful user engagement are most likely to be successful in the future. Digital reality technologies, including AR/VR, speech recognition, mixed reality, and immersive technologies, enable more natural user engagement with a human-centric approach as compared to conventional keyboards experiences.

“Almost one in four CXO considers customer experience as the biggest opportunity for 2020 to sustain.”

It has become the utmost priority for organizations to relieve the pressure from technology firms and information technology teams to deliver more personalized experiences to their customers, employees, and partners.

The successful digitization to achieve better customer experience requires commitment and boldness from the leadership team. According to one of the firm’s CEO, the customer-first approach is everything that they use to empower and achieve their digital ambition. To do so, simply follow a few steps like:

• Define what is better customer experience for your target audience
• Figure out what is user engagement in terms of the commercial aspect
• And allocate roles and responsibilities to ensure internal alignment

Based on the research conducted by Genpact, it is predicted that by 2025 AI-driven enterprises will be 10x more efficient and hold 2x market share as compared to the organizations that have yet not followed AI adoption. Thus, the adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies is not just a matter of innovation, but it is indeed crucial for the survival of the businesses. The organizations are investing heavily in the AI and ML to expedite and personalize customer services.

They are evolving to understand the value of AI and ML is heavily reliant on the data they fed to their systems. And to maximize the returns on AI adoption and Machine Learning, the organizations must brainstorm about the following things:

• Identify the most crucial data sets
• Discover the value proposition
• List out the APIs
• Validate the quality of the data
• Identify the contributors and ways to track the data

With the help of AI adoption and the use of Machine Learning technologies, enterprises or small businesses can rapidly identify and automate most of their business processes. It can be extended in the future to automate various phases like i.e. discovery, analysis, design, monitoring, and so on.

“As per the report from Gartner, by 2022, application integrations carried out using robotic process automation (RPA) will grow by 40% year over year.”

However, there are certain complications associated with the automation for the organizations. For example, to achieve the maximum benefit from the automation, the organizations must allocate a dedicated workforce to leverage from the full value of the implementation.

In today’s time when organizations are dealing with trillions of data, a single cloud cannot fulfill the need of the organizations all alone.

“In research, it is found that almost 84% of enterprises, having 1000+ staff, prefer to opt for multiple and distributed cloud strategy.”

The evolution of a distributed cloud is the beginning of a new era in the cloud computing field. However, the concept of distributed cloud is still in its early stage and will take some time to get mature enough to tackle the core services of the enterprises.

Cognitive technologies, including neural networks, robotic process automation, bots, natural language processing, and neural sets, possess the power to transform almost every industry. With the help of personalized and more human-like interactions, such technologies help businesses to reduce human involvement. This in turn will boost the concept of “Human Augmentation”.

“By 2023, 30% of IT organizations will work on the concept of Bring Your Own Enhancement (BYOE) to target human augmentation in the workforce.”

However, it is important to understand that the potential benefits of cognitive technologies are linked with the trust and technical ethics followed by the organization. To implement the cognitive technologies successfully in the future, the organizations need to become more transparent, identify the impact on the trust of customers, and overcome the effects on them.

To leverage the true potential of digital transformation, the next thing to do for enterprises is to partner with a technology firm. Today, the majority of enterprises are placing Information Technology at its core of the business.

“IT efficiency is vital for the success of digital transformation initiatives by the organizations. 80% of the organizations have put increasing IT efficiency as one of the key goals to achieve their digital transformation initiative.”

In the future, organizations must work as a technology firm and leverage the advancements in technology to enhance the stakeholder experience. Today, the organizations are investing heavily in various emerging technologies, such as Big Data, IoT, Blockchain, AI/ML, Microservices, and more. This shows how organizations are preparing themselves for future trends.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Department of Homeland Security has named blockchain as an essential technology to fight coronavirus and to fix their economic condition. Moreover, implementation of the blockchain technology could help to fix the broken supply chain by processing and validating transactions quickly. It is found that almost 60% of CIOs are at the edge of integrating blockchain into their existing infrastructure by the end of 2020.

“Statista forecasts that the global blockchain technology market will reach to 39 billion U.S. dollars by 2025.”

On the other hand, not only the financial firms but the government, life science, and healthcare sectors are continuously investing in blockchain technology. It will enable organizations to do a lot of new things to help them achieve the desired business goals in the future.

Today, the idea of interaction of the end-user with computers is replaced by sensor-based and touchable technologies like wearable devices and advanced computer sensors. In such a scenario, multi-experience has emerged as a key trend to create a richer and intuitive experience.

“By 2021, one-third of the organizations will have multi-experience platforms in place to support mobile, web, and AR development initiatives.”

Recently, Domino’s Pizza has enabled a multi-experience platform to enable tracking and smart speaker communication. Moreover, the platform also supports autonomous vehicles and drones to carry out pizza deliveries. However, the technology faces certain privacy issues and it is in its early stage. But in the future, it is going to be the need of an hour.

The technological advancements discussed here will continue to shape up the digital transformation in the future. Together, they’re enabling a path for a new thought process of considering customer experience and the human element at the core of transformation initiatives for the enterprises. However, in the end, it is about how we utilize technology to transform our lives. Meanwhile, learn more, dig deep, and stay advanced.