What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is integration of digital technology into all areas of business that fundamentally changes the ways one operates and delivers value to customers. It also encompasses a cultural change that requires organizations to challenge their status quo, experiment, and embrace upcoming changes.
As digital technologies dramatically reshape industry after industry, many companies are pursuing large-scale change efforts to capture the benefits of these trends or simply to keep up with their competitors.
No wonder that digitalization with all its convenience, improved speed and high productivity has already caused enormous changes to the manufacturing sector, where customers’ digital expectations are constantly rising. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the modern world is going through a digital revolution, another moment in history that marks a turning point for the way global businesses operate, communicate and grow.
As one of the Forbes sources notes, “digital transformation is crucial to turning marginal growth into exponential growth. It is considered the accelerator for bending the curve on productivity, time to market, deployment of new business models and revenue generation.” Even more, digital transformation is extremely essential for the overall corporate survival.
Why digital transformation?
Businesses may decide to adopt digital transformation for multiple reasons, although for many of them it's a survival issue that triggers the changes. Businesses don't transform by choice - it’s too expensive and risky.
Technology has initiated this shift, and companies that want to succeed must understand how to merge technology with strategy. Thus, Worldwide Semiannual Digital Transformation Spending Guide informs that 30 % of G2000 companies will have allocated capital budget equal to at least 10 % of revenue to fuel their digital strategies.
For the businesses to remain highly competitive, they should know how to effectively harness the power of today’s digital capabilities to evolve, innovate and drive growth.
Due to the rapidly emerging digital tools and capabilities, businesses across the manufacturing industry now got an ability to improve collaboration, increase decision making speed, develop and produce new products, as well as gain greater visibility into their entire operation.
The moment of truth has finally come! Digitalization is here to accelerate your business model innovations and to drive the adoption of brand new emerging technologies for sustainable competitive advantage.
Let’s take a look at 5 digital transformation trends that have already changed the way the companies deal with digital operations management:
1. Mainstream nature of multi-cloud adoption
In 2018, the leading cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, accounted for 65 % of the market share of public cloud infrastructure and platform services. It’s evident that many companies are increasingly relying on multiple cloud providers to avoid lock-in and harness innovative product offerings, global presence and flexible pricing strategies.
2. Cloud-native skills gap is growing
Software containers have fast emerged as the standard deployment vehicle for agile and reliable enterprise services. The transition from virtual machine management to monolithic development patterns to agile microservices will transform the way enterprises build, deploy and optimize cloud-based applications. IT operations teams will need to develop a new set of competencies to manage the health and performance of containerized services.
IT experts can no longer rely on manual scripts to manage large, distributed systems, for they need to embrace infrastructure as code to provision, deploy, monitor, alert and auto-scale cloud-native services.
3. Commodity monitoring converts into strategic monitoring
Development teams will use multiple data sources to understand, verify and debug cloud-native systems. It means that while IT teams will need new tools to manage autonomous cloud-native services, it is a key to understand relationship between individual components and the overall system to effectively troubleshoot microservices in production.
4. AIOps emerges as the way to tame alert storms
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is a clear necessity for modern IT infrastructure teams to keep up with the diversity, velocity and volume of IT operational and event data. IT teams can proactively prevent service outages, analyze real-time incidents using contextual knowledge and remediate problems using AIOps tools.
AIOps will help enterprises run and optimize mission-critical systems by improving response time for digital interactions and by eliminating siloed/redundant processes.
5. Business-aware, service-centric delivery optimizes customer experiences
To help the business remain competitive, IT teams simply must transition from managing hybrid IT infrastructure assets to prioritizing and supporting business-critical services. Service-centric operations management combines business insights, customer knowledge and relevant metrics to improve digital performance, enhance customer interactions and support business goals. IT teams will need to focus on the business value of IT services while offering holistic infrastructure visibility and control at the business process level.
It goes without saying that clear strategy and focused execution will separate the digital winners from losers. Moreover, the ways how the manufacturing giants will be responding to major digital trends will be key to unlocking disruptive innovation, operational transformation and business value.
So, is the game really worth the candles?
Definitely, it is.
Nobody said it would be easy. It won’t. You’ll have to work very hard together with your whole team to achieve your set goals.
It’s all about the survival of the strongest players of the sector. Despite the fact that digital transformation is a massive challenge for many manufacturers, when done right, it will definitely produce a business that is more aligned with customer demands and resilient in the fast-moving digital future.
Businesses should train their people to adapt to the inevitable modifications. By investing into the knowledge of their workers that will later bring value and offer a more consultative approach, organizations are investing into their future success too. Likewise, adoption of the top-notch solutions in the areas such as cost transparency, rewards options and rebates, consumption-based pricing, will ensure that a customer is fully aware of the value provided by a company.
One of the biggest misconceptions CIOs have about digital transformation is that all their competitors are much further ahead of the game than they are. It’s a huge mistake. Remember, your case, as well as your company’s necessities and challenges, are very unique and deserve a specially elaborated strategy. Embracing the changes is always risky. It requires everyone in the company to re-think the role of digital transformation in operations and its impact on their day-to-day experience.
Unleashing digital transformation potential might take time and effort. Surely, you can overcome these obstacles on the way to your digital journey. You just need a staged approach with a clear roadmap, involving a variety of stakeholders, beyond silos and internal/external limitations.
Be brave. Be flexible. Be ready to embrace the changes. You can do it!
