Digitising your business. Ready or not, digital transformation is reinventing business as we know it. Every enterprise including yours now faces a choice between innovation or extinction. It is now essential that you start digitising your business. Digital transformation is not specifically about IT or technology, it’s about redefining your entire business strategy and perhaps even changing your corporate culture to succeed. Your company should think of technology as not just as a support function, but as a strategic essential foundational principle. Digital transformation is not just about applying technology to your business, it is about creating entirely new business models on the backbone of technology.
Amazon.com was not just a shop with a website, it forever disrupted and revolutionized the entire concept of shopping and more. It is now imperative for every business to adapt and take advantage of the ways the digital world has radically changed consumer behaviour and expectations.
As of 2017 mobile devices dominate total minutes spent online searching, reading, emailing, browsing, and shopping, and that’s globally. 71% of the US to 91% in Indonesia and sixty-seven percent of Millennials prefer to shop online. 56% of Gen Xers, 41% of baby boomers and 28% of seniors prefer to shop online rather than in-store and it’s not just for retail consumers. 55% of b2b buyers say they search for product or vendor information on social media and according to a 2017 cloud carry study 55% of b2b buyers expect mobile access to a seller’s ecommerce platform
…Your customers, your channels, and your competitors have already gone digital.!
Even your own products, employees, and business operations are already dependent on digital technology. The digital transformation continues to accelerate for two main reasons, first, technology is evolving at an exponential rate, second, data is far more plentiful and usable. Mastering emerging technology has always made the difference between companies being competitive or barely keeping up.
What makes today’s digital transformation different is the extreme importance of data, not just big batches of data but real-time data. Data about your consumers, data about your competitors, data about your supply chain, and data about your markets. Having this data and knowing how to use it pulls your critical business decisions out of the shadow of opinion or guesswork and brings intelligent options into the light instantly so your business can do new things and do things right.
The digital transformation has the potential to level the playing field. It provides low-cost tools and enables strategies that give small and medium-sized businesses a fighting chance to compete at the same level as major enterprises. Successful companies that have disrupted an entire industry often did so by changing business models and processes in ways that vastly improve the customer experience. Data is what makes these new models possible. Digital transformation depends on data, and data depends on effective collection, cybersecurity, analytics, and application get the data, protect the data, analyse the data, then utilize the data.
These are the essentials of a digital transformation and are the essential skills that your company will either have to outsource, hire, or train an upscale from the inside. Do you have a digital transformation strategy, according to a 2017 Forrester report 74% of business executives say their company has a digital strategy but only 15% believe that their company has the skills and capabilities to execute on that strategy.
Digitally transforming your organization changes everything. It changes your corporate strategy, it changes your business processes, it changes your marketing capabilities, it even changes the roles and skills you need to fill in order to bridge the gaps between your company and the technologies you need to master. It is now essential you start digitising your business otherwise your most certainly heading to extinction.