- According to Globalnewswire, the market value of global digital transformation is $220.9 billion as of 2018
- According to MarketWatch, the digital transformation market size will touch more than $462 billion by 2024 growing at CAGR of 18.5% in the period 2019-24
- Markets and Markets predicts that the size of digital transformation will reach $665 billion by 2023
- Industrial Development Corporation(IDC) forecasts that the enterprises’ investment in digital transformation will extend to $2 trillion by 2023 and will grow at CAGR of 17.1% in the period 2019-23
Digital transformation simply refers to the digital changes or modification made beyond traditional methods and practices in the areas of a business to improve the way you operate and deliver value to customers. In present context, where competition in the market is at peak, digital transformation is a must and companies that avoid risk-taking are unlikely to thrive. Equally important, employee retention is a tough thing for organizations nowadays, unlike in the past where our forefathers were happy working in one organization throughout their lives. People seek for better platforms and opportunities where the work can be completed in a convenient way. So, company leaders need to bear this in mind and foster a culture able to change and invent the new in order to grow and attract the best talent.
Digital success is not only about technology but strategy as well; strategy that does not require large monetary incentive, just inventiveness. The tale of tables is a powerful example of a finding of 2015’s MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte digital business study. One wouldn’t expect that changing the size of tables in an employee cafeteria could be emblematic of the digital transformation of a business. But considering the example: Humanyze, a people-analytics company, analyzed a travel company’s workforce and discovered that people eating lunch together shared important insights that made them productive. Humanyze found that employees typically lunched with either four or twelve people. The integration of digital technologies pointed the way to changing table sizes, which had a direct and measurable impact on employees’ ability to produce.
Digitization, Digitalization and Digital Transformation:
Digitization, digitalization and digital transformation are often used together. Sometimes even interchangeably- this is a mistake.
Digitization simply means converting information from a physical format to digital one. Scanning a paper document and saving it on computer’s hard drive as a digital document, like PDF is digitization. Then digitalization is leveraging digitization or making digitized information work for you. Uploading the PDF document from a computer’s hard drive to the cloud and sharing it with many people to analyze the data is digitalization. And digital transformation is modifying or changing the activities or products to enhance efficiency, reduce cost and increase sales. Moving the data from a Google Sheet into an app or system that will analyze the data is digital transformation.
Digital Transformation Strategy:
The question that arises is where do you start? And where do you want your strategy to take you?
For any organization to reach somewhere, it needs to have a correct path; a direction. And for that, a holistic mindset and a profound understanding are required. Understanding the current scenario of business in the market can be the first step. This gives an idea of what kind of transformation is required for the business. Communicating with the employees, who are going to work under the transformation, is next important thing. Also, the company may require new employees with advance skill sets as focusing on technology only without having great manpower won’t be that effective. Also, the link between the transformation and responsibilities of employee should be made as good as possible by making the experimenting easy for them. Likewise, there can be many risk factors for company to think about.
As said by Michael Wade – “There isn’t a single ‘make or break’ step in a digital transformation”. Well, digital transformation strategy, therefore, is not a finite number of steps. Although the strategies might vary from company to company, it is basically only about planning, mapping and prioritizing the future. Strategies are basically made for bridging the gap between plans and goals and reaching the goals is all that any individual from any company wants.
Recent trends in digital transformation:
With the culmination of technological advancement, the method and practices, we were exercising in the business with the digital technologies in earlier days are somehow coming to an end and there are new trends in the market every now and then. Some of the recent trends in the digital transformation include:
Extensive use of multi-cloud:
The companies are advancing towards using multi-cloud for the storage of the business-related data and ostensibly, it is on its way to exponentiation. According to RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 84% of the global enterprises are embracing the strategy of using multi-cloud. In the recent few years, cloud is heralded to take over most of the IT market and it is expected that over 40% of expenditure in IT field is going to be cloud related. Increase of cloud-based applications is also expected.
Ascension of 5G network:
5G refers to 5th generation of cellular network technology. 5G came into the spotlight by the end of 2018 and is still on an ongoing development. The first country to adopt 5G on a large scale was South Korea, in April 2019. Some popular telecommunication companies like Qualcomm, AT & T, and Ericsson are making sure that 5G keeps up its pace and are already manufacturing 5G-based products. 5G helps reduce latency of communication, make downloading faster and increases capacity as the network expands.
Era of AI:
Artificial Intelligence has proved its ability and applicability in every field of work. AI is also of great use in analytics in business. With the aid of enhanced AI and Machine Learning (ML), we can accomplish tasks very effortlessly in few minutes that would other require days and a lot of human effort. AI powered technologies have offered AI assistant, AI powered search, conversational chatbots and virtual bots and are useful in analytics to process large chunks of data within snap of a finger.
Digital privacy:
Technological companies got caught up in the issues of lack of data privacy of the clients. This led to draw the concern of government in many countries. EU’s formulation of General Data Formulation Regulation and growing calls in the US’s to impose controls on technological companies will more likely encumber the technology companies by strict data laws and reducing the potential of data embezzlement, thus ensuring digital privacy in coming days.
Emphasis on RPA:
Robot Processed Automation (RPA) is a familiar term in digital market. Attended RPA leads the way but as interest and investments continue to grow, and RPA proves itself trustworthy. Enterprise companies like Cisco are already using RPA to help create wiggle room to up skill and augment the value of their existing workforce, and that model is certain to quickly grow into a winning formula.
