5 Latest Trends You Should Embrace To Succeed At Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has its perks. From improved collaboration to better resource management, actionable customer insights to higher profits, higher productivity to delivering a better customer experience, you can not ignore its advantages.

According to digital transformation statistics, 70% of businesses who have already jumped on the digital transformation bandwagon either increased or retained their spending on digital transformation even during the pandemic. On the other hand, 58% of business that has not initiated a digital transformation program said that COVID-19 has forced them to speed up their digital initiatives.

What if the world comes back to normal after few years as the pandemic ends? Should IT leaders continue with the same approach, adopt new trends or tweak their strategy according to the changing times? As new technology goes mainstream and new opportunities surface, you need to pivot and adopt new trends in order to drive your digital initiatives to success.

In this article, you will learn about five modern trends that will help you succeed at digital transformation.

1. Mature Customer Data Platforms

Successful companies always put customer needs first. This is easier said than done in a world where customer preferences and behavior changes rapidly. That is where customer data platforms come in handy. In addition to improving customer service, it can also tweak product development strategies and make changes to sales priorities and marketing campaigns.

These platforms consolidate all the data from different sources of customer data such as customer relationship management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, marketing automation tools and even customer fulfillment systems and give you a unique view of the customer. This allows you to deliver more immersive customer experiences. Moreover, customer data platforms can also enable businesses to build stronger and long-lasting relationships with their partners and suppliers.

Apart from these benefits, it also improves your operational efficiency. As these platforms continue to mature, we will see their wider adoption across enterprises. That is when you will see its real advantages. Despite its challenges, more and more companies will adopt a fully developed customer data platform.

2. Evaluating Return On Machine Learning Investment

Before the pandemic, most businesses are still struggling to implement machine learning programs that go beyond pilot or proof of concept phases. Only a handful of companies managed to succeed at it. Thankfully, things are changing for the better as we are seeing industries that tend to lag far behind in those initiatives making progress. We are now seeing telecom and energy sectors using AI in production. Even if they are on a small scale, at least it is a step in the right direction.

According to a report, a vast majority (97%) of respondents managed to achieve quantifiable benefits of adopting AI at scale while more than one-third (39%) said that they have been pleasantly surprised as benefits were more than they have initially expected. As the number of machine learning platforms continues to grow, it will soon make this technology accessible for the vast majority of organizations. 

This will encourage companies who have been slow at adopting machine learning due to technology or resource shortage. Investment in machine learning will continue to grow but so does the scrutiny of machine learning investments. Next time you need approval for your machine learning budget, you will have to convince your board members that it is worth the investment.

3. Rise of Low Code and Agile Methodologies

Application development has come a long way since its inception. Gone are the days when developers tend to use linear methodologies. Today, they are focusing more on low code and agile methodologies. This allows businesses to bring new products faster to the market and enhance the efficiency of their business processes.

The demand for low-code and no-code is showing an upward trend for quite some time now but COVID-19 has put it into top gear. Mobile app development company are preferring a hybrid approach that where both low code or no-code platforms are used in conjunction to turbocharge the app development process. 

These platforms also open a world of opportunities for everyone to create apps faster even if they lack advanced programming or coding knowledge. This will make app development more convenient even for organizations that lag behind in terms of core competencies. This will also make it easier for businesses to support and integrate those apps with their current ecosystems.

4. Multi-Cloud Strategy

The problem most businesses have these days is that they are adding new technologies faster to support data operations, machine learning and cloud initiatives than getting rid of legacy systems, data centers and business processes. Despite this, most businesses that have already adopted multi-cloud architectures won’t rollback. As a result, they need a well-thought-out multi-cloud strategy in order to drive their business successfully through this paradigm shift.

Here are some of the steps they can take to make it happen.

• Automate more and more IT tasks
• Improve incident management by leverage automation and operational tools
• Integrate IT service management, site reliability engineering and DevOps in order to enhance collaboration between them
• Adopt tools that are compatible with many public and private clouds
• Invest in continuous integration and delivery, automate testing and best security practices

5. Changing Approach from Waterfall To Agile

As mentioned before, developers have ditched linear methodologies and shifting towards agile methodology. This requires a shift in approach. That is why it is important to develop a roadmap before making the shift. Moreover, you have to demonstrate business value in order to drive agile culture and processes forward.

IT and business leaders should both be on the same page in order to succeed with digital transformation. In some cases, IT leaders might even have to challenge their project management office to work with agile teams. Your goal should be to create an agile value stream by using tools and adopt continuous planning practices to achieve success.

Which trends do you follow when it comes to digital transformation? Share it with us in the comments section below.