Benefits of Digital Transformation for an Enterprise
As the markets become oversaturated and more dynamic and consumer behavior changes, enterprises across industries have to adapt. Technology appears to be a go-to solution for many enterprises. All of a sudden, there is a new elephant in the room – digital transformation. Fortunately, there are more and more enterprises every day ready to acknowledge it and adequately address it.
What is digital transformation? How can it benefit an enterprise? Why is building data pipelines important? These are fundamental questions that call for thorough answers. This article will quickly define digital transformation and go through the benefits it offers to an enterprise.
The Definition of Digital Transformation
Gartner offers a really straightforward definition of digital transformation: “It is the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model.”
Digital transformation is on the opposite side of the status quo. There can be hundreds of business processes in an enterprise. Digital transformation’s goal would be to leverage the emerging technologies to re-invent these processes and improve and optimize them.
It can help enterprises identify legacy work methodologies and replace them with brand new methodologies rooted in cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
In other words, if an enterprise does a business in one way, after the completion of the digital transformation process, it will do the same business but in a completely different way. So, why go through such an extensive transformation? Why disrupt the status quo that still delivers results?
To answer these questions, we have to list all the benefits of digital transformation for an enterprise.
Data Pipeline for Improved Data Collection
If you do online research on digital transformation, you’ll find that it often goes in the same sentence with the words “data pipeline.” Why does the data pipeline matter so much? The data pipeline encompasses different processes and technologies used to ingest raw business data from several sources and store it in a specified location. It can also include various features such as filtering to minimize the risk of failure and ensure the validity of data.
Building data pipelines is one of the core digital transformation processes. Nowadays, enterprises use dozens of unique apps spread across departments. As a result, we have data silos. In other words, product or service development, customer, client, marketing, and research data are fragmented across different apps.
Unfortunately, there is very little you can do with data silos, and everything you do takes so much of your time. Pulling data from various sources and manually consolidating it in a spreadsheet is a Sisyphean task.
With a carefully-planned data pipeline, an enterprise will be able to consolidate data into one location, thus enabling data analysis for business intelligence. With cutting-edge tools, enterprises can now even build real-time data pipelines into streaming apps.
Task Automation Boosts Productivity
Redundant and repetitive tasks are time inefficient. More importantly, people in charge of them are prone to make errors due to the nature of repetitive work. Digital transformation helps enterprises re-design their process to make them more human-friendly while boosting productivity.
Once you have a data pipeline, you can do wonders in terms of productivity. You can feed data streams into your business apps. It becomes incredibly efficient once you feed data into automation software, and you will be able to streamline the workflow across departments.
It has a massive impact on productivity. First, the specialized software can complete repetitive tasks more efficiently than any human agent and without any errors. And, secondly, your employees will have more time on their hands and be able to work more efficiently.
A Suite of Tools Specific for Your Enterprise
Every enterprise is unique. Several things contribute to this outcome, ranging from the organization’s culture and business processes to a specific target audience and competition. Before the digital transformation, many enterprises went through the process of digitalization. That led to massive software adoption rates. If we want to be more precise, on average, an enterprise business uses 900 different applications.
With so many solutions in place, it doesn’t come as a surprise to see enterprises struggling with dispersed databases and software.
Digital transformation is a valuable opportunity for enterprises to integrate software and databases into one place. Enterprises can assess their current needs and build a relevant suite of tools. It will improve resource management and give structure to the workflow.
Faster Innovation and Adaptation
The status quo renders many enterprises inactive, solely focused on keeping the wheel spinning. When the entire focus on keeping the business alive and products moving, there is very little room for innovation and adaptation. Digital transformation is bound to disrupt the status quo and enable enterprises to become more agile.
Markets and the competition won’t wait. The rapid changes in demand and customer behavior and needs demand faster adaptation. The only way to answer is to re-invent the business processes and make the entire organization more agile.
Thanks to agile solutions that deliver high performance and don’t require big integration budgets, such as Enterprise Service Bus, will enable enterprises to adopt continuous improvement strategies. More importantly, it will enable organizations to switch platforms and integrate new software solutions effortlessly.
Data-Driven Business Decisions
Balancing business-centric and customer-centric strategies can be painful without proper business intelligence. Due to the information being locked in data silos, enterprises cannot leverage data to become data-driven efficiently, at least not like they would’ve been able to do it with a data pipeline.
If you want to unlock customer, business performance, and market opportunities insights, you need a key. There’s only one key – the data. It’s another instance that explains why a data pipeline matters.
In any case, digital transformation puts enterprises in a position to harness the power of both structured and unstructured data. With access to accurate, actionable data, businesses can minimize the growth and expansion risks while taking care of the customer needs at all times.
Enhanced Collaboration
The emergence of the internet as a mass form of communication affects organizations’ cultures across industries. Efficient collaboration is something most experts in the business world insist on. However, to achieve it in a modern workspace, enterprises have to assess the modern needs of their staff.
They need access to the right tools specifically tailored to their and the organization’s needs. Digital transformation can help enterprises re-invent collaboration and adopt the tools that enable enhanced collaboration.
Digital transformation can help promote digital culture in-house, one that supports digital change and innovation. Two things both enterprises and staff can benefit from.
Digital transformation has started a new era in the world of business. Building data pipelines and adopting cutting-edge tech to improve the business processes is what digital transformation is all about. It offers way too many benefits to enterprises to be ignored – increased productivity, improved business decision process, and enhanced collaboration, to name a few.