So, as I said – 4 big ones. Customer centricity, data, cloud and technology, agility and one newbie: the coronavirus pandemic.
Let’s go through each one and what impact they have on driving digital transformation.
Customer Centricity
To kick off, I’ll start with what customer centricity means. Al Ramich for Forbes describes it better than I could:
“Being customer-centric means anticipating a customer’s wants, needs and communication preferences. And then getting it right.”
If you can get it right, this can mean huge benefits for your organisation – however, if you get it wrong, well… as Ramich continues, “you could lose precious customers.”
This is why customer centricity drives digital transformation. Getting it right relies on you understanding customer behaviour, which is a lot easier post-digital transformation. Digitised processes can help in many ways, such as accruing, analysing and predicting data about customer needs.
Data
Data, data, data. It runs everything, and is one of the most important drivers of all in my opinion.
The insights one can glean from data have so many potential uses; it can propel every department of your organisation forward, from finance to marketing – even to human resources.
That’s why heightening your intake and understanding of data through digital transformation is such an important step to staying on the cutting edge of business.
Cloud and Technology
This is a pretty broad title, so let’s hone in a bit on what we mean by breaking it into two.
Let’s start with cloud, or cloud computing, a fundamental asset for most modern organisations. Once again, I’ll defer to an expert to explain. Take it away, Microsoft:
“Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.”
As you’ve just read, cloud computing can offer real, invaluable benefits to a business. These benefits require a level of digitalisation, and that is why cloud computing drives it forth.
If you want to use cloud computing, you need to start your digital transformation.
Now, let’s look at technology. Seemingly a vague term, but in this context the vaguity is key.
There are so many new technologies being released every single day. To narrow down the term would lessen the gravity of just how important technology is.
Not only does technology facilitate the transformation, but by transforming, a business will have access to a multitude of technologies that could optimise their processes exponentially.