Rapidly evolving customer expectations, growing market pressures, and overall organizational goals have fueled digital transformation in every industry. It’s projected that by 2025, global spending for transformational efforts is expected to reach $2.8 trillion.[1] Digital transformation is the process of leveraging new technologies, across all areas of an organization, to optimize operations and drive growth by providing new value to customers.

Digital transformation evolves the way an organization conducts business, enabling them to transition from outdated processes and legacy equipment with the use of new technology. Best thought of as a continual adaptation to a constantly changing environment, it’s a journey that strives towards optimization across processes, divisions, and the business ecosystem as a whole.  Rarely is there an end to digital transformation, it’s a way to meet strategic objectives and to turn marginal into exponential growth.

Technologies of Digital Transformation

There’s a variety of technologies powering this digital transformation journey. Advancements in networking, hardware, and software provide organizations with the ability to implement a digital strategy.

Could Computing: Organizations are moving from legacy systems to cloud-based applications. Providing flexibility and scalability to meet business demands, data is accessible from any device.

Artificial Intelligence: AI can support many business needs including, automating processes, engaging with customers, and enables smart decision making based on the large amounts of data it continually collects.

Internet Of Things (IoT): Continuously connecting, exchanging, and analyzing data, businesses are able to leverage IoT insights. Real-time data is invaluable, helping to improve productivity, increase customer engagement and optimize efficiency.

Strategizing For Digital Transformation

A digital transformation has many considerations, stakeholders, and components to it. Before executing a plan, a strategy must be built.

Assess Current Business Situation

An organization must assess its current organizational structure. Conducting a business audit will help key stakeholders understand one of the most critical aspects of digital transformation efforts, like their values, current operations and processes. They must also identify weaknesses and anticipate future challenges.

Determine Goals

To successfully execute a digital transformation strategy, an organization must make sure that the plan they’ve created is aligned with their business goals. It’s the how and why.

Conduct Pilot Testing

Digital transformation completely overhauls the way business is conducted. The team strategizing the transformation must enable employees with the support needed to successfully work in this new environment. Before deploying new principles, pilot tests will gauge customer feedback before a full rollout, identify bottlenecks and help determine if an organization is ready for full-scale implementation.

Create A Roadmap

Executing each previous step will now allow a digital transformation team to develop a strategy on how to overcome challenges and meet goals. Many times, reframing corporate infrastructure is necessary. During road map creation, the skillset of each employee should be evaluated to determine the key players at each stage of the journey.

Preparing For Change

Although digital transformation revolves around technology, people play an integral role in its success. To successfully execute a digital transformation strategy, employees must feel empowered to embrace change and to work differently. Constant communication and explaining to them the goal of this process is extremely significant.

The Future Is Now

Digital transformation builds bridges between organizations, their technology, and customers. These systems will allow organizations to build a bridge to the future by establishing new networks and ecosystems, leading to new business models to achieve future growth. This new digital world will revolve around data, actionable intelligence, and connectivity.

A connected ecosystem is integral to digital transformation. Any type of network disruption will render these applications useless. During rollout, it’s critical to have always-on network access. The continuous addition of new applications places a strain on the network, increasing the likelihood of an outage.

When it comes to network outages, it’s never a matter of if it will occur, it’s just a matter of when and how long it’ll take to recover. Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform ensures that organizations have the connectivity needed throughout their digital transformation journey. Smart Out-of-Band and Failover to Cellular provide an independent management plan, allowing the IT team access infrastructure, at every site. They always have a full view of the network remotely, which gives them the ability to identify and remediate the issue quickly.

Also providing the necessary NetOps capabilities, necessary for many digital initiatives of future thinking organizations, Opengear solutions enable secure provisioning of new remote sites.

Opengear is here to help facilitate your digital transformation, on Day One, during an outage, and every day.

[1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS48372321