Technology is changing business landscape. To survive and thrive in this changing business landscape, every business has to learn how to transform their business digitally. There are many reasons why a business performs the digital transformation, for example:

  1. There are problems with productivity
    Digital transformation can be a solution to increase the company's productivity by breaking up every bottleneck in the business process and make the existing workflows to be simpler and more efficient.  There are also opportunities to automate some manual processes by utilizing the correct technology. For example, a company is utilizing OCR or barcode scans to reduce manual data entry.

  2. There are issues in the current customer experience
    A business needs to meet customer expectations in this competitive world. Improving the customer's satisfaction can bring great impact to company business. Providing a simple customer journey, data-driven customer personalization, and omnichannel experience to the customer are the keys to achieve sustainable business growth.
  3. Lack of analysis to support the decision-making process
    With the help of modern business intelligence tools, any company can easily process and combine its data, quickly get insights, and then transform them into meaningful information. Digital transformation in decision-making will help the company to react and take the opportunities faster and more accurately.
  4. Need to increase the company's profits
    With a correct approach, digital transformation can improve the company's profitability. Eventually, when a company focus on improving productivity, raising customer's satisfaction, and always make correct decisions, it will also gain a significant improvement in profitability.

The situations presented by the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly changed customer behaviors and expectations, and some changes may last even after the pandemic. In order to increase survivability, every business needs to adapt to those situations quickly, and in some cases, a digital transformation that would also transform the business process or business model can become a solution.

There are a lot of examples of how businesses change their business process in response to the pandemic situation. For example, some restaurants have implemented digital menus and online ordering systems that can be accessed by the customers using their own smartphone.

In terms of technology adoption which would support digital transformation, there are some trends in 2021 that we need to keep an eye on, such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
    Artificial intelligence and machine learning are both the most sophisticated technology nowadays. Many people believe that it will be widely used and change the landscape of the future. AI implementation in the business process will help to reduce costs, improve operational efficiencies, avoid any possible human errors, and make faster decisions. Some examples of AI implementations are facial recognition systems, chatbots, fraud detection, etc.
  • Data Analytics and Business Intelligence
    As more companies need to make a correct data-driven business decision faster, the adoption of data analytics and business intelligence in the business decision-making process would go through an explosion in 2021.
  • Modern Infrastructure
    Cloud infrastructure technology has so many improvements in the last decade. With so many modern infrastructure options available, the terms of XaaS can refer to that anything can be provided as a service now. The adoption of modern infrastructures like containers, Kubernetes, serverless computing, and the hybrid cloud can significantly reduce the operational cost and maximize the utilization of server resources.
  • Microservices
    With the microservices approach, an application will be structured as a collection of small independent services that are loosely coupled and highly maintainable. By adopting microservices, the application will have a reliable infrastructure with zero downtime. It is also a perfect match to agile development which would help to reduce time-to-market.

Once a business has decided to make digital transformation, a strategy for success in the transformation is needed. There are some success factors in digital transformation, such as:

  • Having clear goals and objectives
    Before performing a digital transformation, we need to ask ourselves:
    • "why" do we need it?
    • "what" do we want to achieve?
    • "how" can we measure success?

Setting up clear objectives and goals will prevent us from getting lost and keep us on the right track. While defining the KPI will let us focus on what we want to achieve and pay attention to the things we should concern about.

  • Strategy
    A correct strategy can significantly increase the success of the digital transformation. The strategy should be created based on meaningful insights from data analysis. The data will generate useful information about customer behaviors, current process performance, sales, and help us identify the opportunities that we can take.

  • Adoption of modern technologies
    Leveraging modern technologies will help us to automate processes, reduce cost, improve business performance, and improve customer experience.

  • Do it in stages by steps
    Digital transformation should be implemented step-by-step. And we need to apply a cycle of planning - implement - evaluate in each step.

Today, digital transformation is required in all areas of an organization or business. Implementing the right technology & strategy can improve the chances of successfully making digital changes to the business.

Author: Richan (Technical Director)