Decision Time: Embrace Digital Transformation or Risk Extinction
The Challenge and the Opportunity
Businesses that have been consistently winning in the past are no longer guaranteed success. The new digital economy has redefined the business landscape. Successful traditional businesses are at a huge risk of not only losing their dominant position, but going out of business.
It is now common knowledge that the biggest media company owns no content (Facebook), the largest transportation company owns no vehicles (Uber), the largest lodging company owns no properties (Airbnb) and the largest marketplace owns no real estate (Alibaba). Technical advancements, ubiquitous connectivity, proliferation of mobile devices combined with our understanding of how humans interact with machines and software has allowed creation of not just new businesses, but increased process efficiency within all industries.
Today, we have the convenience of getting what we need through online marketplaces and highly usable mobile applications that essentially serve as remote controllers, to perform most tasks in both our personal and professional lives. The term face-to-face no longer implies physical proximity, and is replaced with FaceTime-like interactions. The millennials are both drivers of and driven by democratization of information, interactions and transactions; although, adoption is far reaching across all age groups.
While the pace of digitization presents exciting entrepreneurial opportunities, it also presents tremendous risks to traditional businesses. Businesses that have enjoyed healthy growth in the past decade or two are facing fierce pressures from new entrants. Past experiences and knowledge are no longer sufficient to stay ahead. New competitors are both cursed and blessed by the fact that they do not have any pre-dispositions. Disruptive thinking, accelerated progress, relentless execution, unquenched drive, frictionless cultures, and venture capital are fueling new players.
The Path: Digital Transformation
The path forward for traditional businesses is clear. They could maintain status quo and continue to expose themselves to competition, or take the competition head on. The businesses that have identified this challenge as an opportunity are engaged in digital transformation of their businesses. Digital transformation is not just about building faster software or launching a mobile application or adding the word “innovation” in your corporate marketing collateral. Digital transformation is re-thinking how your business engages with customers, partners, and even employees. Many successful, traditional enterprises are now re-thinking and changing the way they conduct business.
Chief Digital Officers are being appointed to strategically drive transformations across enterprises. While it is important to understand engagement, customer journey mapping and create internal business cases, organizations are realizing that strategic planning must be balanced with measurable, rapid progress. Transformations do not happen overnight, and need not be deployed through a big-bang, enterprise-wide initiative. Transformation is an iterative process that initiates in a specific area of the business.
An agile, positive mindset is a must-have to identify the most valuable initiative to undertake that could serve as a catalyst to initiate the transformation. The most valuable initiative could be the area with highest visibility, the area requiring the lowest level of effort or a new initiative that has no dependencies to existing systems and processes.
Businesses must understand that perfection is a continuous process and an iterative approach is the highest value path as it allows for incorporating market feedback early while continuing rapid progress. It is no secret how a definite quick success in one specific area of the business can invigorate the entire organization and serve as a catalyst for the transformation.
Intelligent Hiring
Unless businesses have an infinite amount of technology budgets or investments, it is rarely the case that businesses can conjure up teams to take on a Digital Transformation project. User experience and design experts, product managers, customer engagement and strategic thinkers, data and machine learning scientists, architects, cyber security experts, and good developers and testers are not only hard to find, but require time to build cadence and camaraderie amongst themselves to be truly productive.
Businesses who leverage competent and reliable external partners have a higher chance of success for a variety of reasons, including speed-to-market, productivity, costs, and flexibility. Partners that integrate and work transparently provide the additional opportunity for businesses to benchmark their internal processes and productivity. Healthy competition is often necessary for champions to not just meet but rise above their potential.
Shaping the New Economy
The digital economy poses both a clear challenge and opportunity to traditional businesses. Many traditional business will go out of business losing out to new efficient start-up’s who leverage technology to operate. There is an opportunity for traditional businesses to re-establish their dominance by transforming themselves: leverage technology as a means to not only stay efficient, but acquire new customers/ audiences that want to communicate through digital properties, such as mobile applications, online market places and asynchronous communication (messaging). Business must invest in these initiatives, and they need to move with lightning speed. Trying to do it all internally and by themselves is a recipe for disaster, given the urgency of the situation and the dearth in “good” technical talent. Businesses need to identify trusted development partners who they can lean on for helping them drive the change in an accelerated manner. There is no time for those classic in-house vs outsourced development debates. The only discussion that businesses need to have is who can help them meet their goals in the fastest, most flexible and affordable way.
10Pearls takes pride in serving as that trusted partner for many businesses who are digitally transforming themselves. 10Pearls expertise across all facets of building mobile and digital properties, i.e., User Experience & Design, Product Management, Architecture, Security, Machine Learning, Big Data & Analytics and Development is what allows us to serve as the “holistic” partner for many businesses. 10Pearls’ experience building mobile and digital solutions across various industry verticals, such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Fashion, Technology, Transportation & Logistics, Telecom & Media allows us to address challenges comprehensively. Ultimately, 10Pearls’ reputation in being the high-value, trusted partner that delivers is what wins us continuous business over our competition.
We look forward to helping businesses take charge and help shape the new economy!
