Digital Transformation in 2021: Unlearning and Relearning

Businesses should focus on better strategies to implement digital transformation in the coming years and do not hesitate to learn from mistakes

We witnessed how the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation across the industries. It was least expected considering the usual slow pace and resisted acceptance of digital transformation. The situation of uncertainty prevailed in many industries since the transformation was rather forced than a voluntary one. Businesses had to embrace digitization and automation to survive and be agile during crises. Research conducted by Constellation Research in collaboration with WalkMe surveyed Fortune 500 CIOs and revealed that 77% of CIOs stated digital transformation as their biggest budget priority for 2021. The report also states that CIOs plan an increased IT expenditure budget for the year considering the work-from-home scenario.

Although the digital transformation during last year was a bit staggered and quick, it provides lessons to learn and makes us realize mistakes to not repeat when redefining digitization in 2021.

Customer-Centric Wins the Race

If not anything else, the pandemic taught us the importance of people. A business enterprise should consider its customers as the most precious element and hence, digital transformation should be aimed at providing a better customer experience. Technologies like AI and predictive analysis can be leveraged to understand customer needs and trends. Many successful companies have been using web interfaces to track consumer behaviour and implement changes in their product design according to the insights.

Customer-interaction is also a decisive element for business growth. Today most prospective customers can be traced through social media platforms. Enterprises should focus on collecting regular feedback and act on the requirements. Further, this will increase the reach of their products to a wider audience and help gain customer loyalty.

Optimizing Automation for Business Growth

Automating business processes have impacted in many ways. For example, introducing robotic process automation (RPA) has proved to automate repetitive and mundane tasks at a faster pace with maximum accuracy, which relieves the workload off of employees and enables them to focus on high-priority rational tasks. Automation has been pushed to its beginner level when it can do more. The pandemic for sure accelerated the adoption of AI across industries but limited its use cases to just automate just desk-based tasks.

A Forrester research report revealed that in 2021, more than a thor of companies in growth mode will look up to AI to help with workplace disruption for both location-based, physical, or human-touch workers and knowledge workers working from home. And this will include applying AI for intelligent document extraction, customer-service agent augmentation, return-to-work health tracking, or semi autonomous robots for social separation.

Using advanced automation technologies can provide business growth and efficiency. Thus, enterprises should focus on solving the ethical concerns revolving around AI and embrace it to promote business intelligence.

Consistent Upskilling of Employees

Digital transformation can only occur with the support of a skilled workforce. The sudden demand in digitization during the pandemic did not give enough time for the industries to upskill their employees. Many of them lost jobs due to a lack of skill set necessary for the growing digitization. The increasing skill gap needs to be filled up by constant upskilling of employees and investing in training strategies.

Businesses aiming for digital transformation should invest time in employee engagement and participation by interacting and taking feedback from them.

Focus on Cybersecurity

The pandemic did accelerate digitization and automation but also laid the limelight on cybersecurity and its significance. Last year most of the consumers, as well as organizations, shifted to online platforms for survival reasons. Isolation and lockdowns brought down physical stores and encouraged online services, and we also witnessed a spike in cyber-attacks and data breaches. The small time frame in which all of this happened makes us realize that digitization has its risks and mitigating these risks is what businesses should aim for while reimagining digital transformation in coming years.

The shift to remote work ecosystems increased the data vulnerability across the web-interfaces and thus needs better security measures. Additional security measures should be incorporated using AI, digital identity verification, two-factor authentication, etc., to ensure cybersecurity.