As businesses emerge from the profound impact of the pandemic, it is more important than ever to leverage technology and embrace the digital world. With fewer resources and the challenges of finding and hiring trained professionals, with limited budgets and funding and the need to balance these challenges with new customer demands and changing expectations, your business must focus on digital transformation, data literacy and a business infrastructure that leverages and values ‘real’ facts and data-driven decisions.
In this article, we discuss three crucial aspects of organizational success in the coming year and beyond.
Digital Transformation
Before we talk about the importance of Digital Transformation (Dx) in laying the foundation for future enterprise success, let’s define the term. Digital transformation involves using digital technologies to create new business processes or to modify workflow and processes that are already in place. By its nature, it will transform the way people work, automating approval processes and other aspects of tasks and activities. That means that the business culture must shift as well, in order to support these new tools and techniques.
By enabling business users with the right software and digital tools, and requiring that these users make the use of software and analytical solutions part of their daily routine, the organization will improve Data Literacy. Data Literacy is defined by the ability of business professionals to read, work with, manipulate, analyze, present, and determine the value of data (through data valuation analysis). While data literacy does not require a team member to be a data scientist, it does require that a team member be comfortable and confident with the use and discussion of data. Think of data literacy in the same sense as literacy of any kind. Literacy implies a grasp of, and frequent use of a method of a technique (whether it be reading literature, understanding a language or using data) and assumes at least a basic competence in working with these concepts.
Embracing the concepts of Digital Transformation and Data Literacy requires that the management team champion and support these expectations and require that team members process, approve, monitor and work with data in the digital environment so that everyone has access to the same information.
It is important to realize that Dx does not just demand a focus on technology but, rather a focus on all aspects of the organization. Dx does not work well in an organization that is linear and hierarchical. It thrives with collaboration and flexibility. Digital Transformation requires a comprehensive review of processes, workflows, tasks, relationships and assumptions about how work is executed and how customers are engaged.
No business is static and, even if the enterprise does not have plans to add locations or a large volume of users, a new solution for a specific organizational need, etc., it is likely to find itself faced with requirements it did not anticipate. A skilled IT consultant can plan and design for this flexible, agile environment, so that the business is not boxed in by its previous choices.
Mobile Data Access
Today’s businesses must support employees (and customers) in a mobile environment. Remote working environs and customers who want access to information on the fly have driven businesses to create mobile applications, both to generate revenue and to support remote team members. There are many benefits to deploying a mobile application, whether for business or for consumer use. Here are just a few:
Consumer
- Expanding market reach and visibility
- Improving competitive response
- Acquiring and using data from sales and customer engagement to improve products, services and customer satisfaction
- Integrating workflow and processes to more efficiently complete tasks and optimize resources
- Providing mobile access to products and services to make it easier for customers to research, browse and buy
- Connecting sales, customer service, payment and marketing and upselling
Business
- Improving workflow and streamlining processes and approval loops
- Building a solid data repository and reporting mechanism
- Ensuring that all business users have timely and appropriate access to critical data
- Providing access in the office and on the road
- Providing a uniform approach and access to build data literacy and engender digital transformation
Mobile application development demands expertise. IT consultants with experience in platforms, tools, domains and industries can make recommendations, design, develop and deploy mobile apps that are thoroughly tested and, ideally, work within a hybrid mobile app environment that is suitable for the web, for Android and for iOS devices.
Data Management and Governance
Every business faces the challenge of managing and using data in a way that is meaningful, accurate and easy for users. To meet objectives, plan strategies and analyze information, the average enterprise must juggle best-of-breed, legacy systems, and many other data repositories that sometimes seem to hide data from even the most gifted analysts and IT staff members.To tame those diverse and disparate data sources and integrate data into a central data mart or data warehouse can seem like a daunting task but with the right experience and skill, your enterprise can organize, manage, monitor and analyze internal and external data from all corners of the organization.
Expert ETL consultant services and DWH services can provide support for data mart and data warehouse projects and ETL and DWH Services can be combined with crucial augmented analytics and predictive analytics capabilities to provide data democratization across your enterprise. The concept of Digital Transformation should include consideration of these types of tools to further data literacy initiatives and to bring appropriate data governance and data access to users at every level with multi-level security and access, and integrated data from all areas of the organization. ETL and database services can be combined with self-serve data preparation to help business users work in a worry-free, intuitive environment to get to the data they need and to make decisions and take action quickly and effectively, thereby optimizing the resources within the business and getting ideas to the market in a timely manner.
One last caveat before we close: When considering software products and services and support for Digital Transformation initiatives, it is important to choose the right product and services to support business needs, so as to avoid project failure. An expensive and time-consuming failure will impact future investments and decisions and management teams do not take kindly to poor ROI or TCO. If the team experiences endless user complaints or if team leaders raise issues of non-compliance and poor user adoption, there is likely to be a ripple effect and it will be difficult to position the organization for future enterprise-wide projects and initiatives.
To drive digital transformation and to monitor and manage information, your organization must bring together data repositories and by selecting a partner that has experience and knowledge in the Digital Transformation domain and can create mobile apps, integrate data and provide a means by which users can gather and analyze data to make fact-based decisions, the enterprise can provide tools to manage and distribute data, to automate workflow and to do more with less!
Find out how the right IT consulting partner can help your business achieve its goals with support for Digital Transformation and Data Literacy, hybrid mobile app development and Data Management, Data Extraction Transformation and Loading (ETL) for business users.
