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Without Downtime, Here Are Five Ways To Deal With Digital Transformation

Posted on 16/07/202008/06/2021 by Anteelo Master

Advanced technologies are significantly impacting and transforming the way people communicate and collaborate. How are businesses tackling this evolving corporate landscape?

From an option to a necessity – the trek of the digital transformation journey has always been full of obstacles and problems. When advanced technologies started having a significant impact and transforming the way people communicate, interact, and collaborate with a business, the majority of CEOs realized that it’s a matter of survival in the ever-evolving corporate landscape.

A survey conducted by Tech Pro Research Center in 2018 revealed several interesting facts. Out of all the respondents, 70% admitted that their business heads are either working on a digital transformation or already have one in place. Moreover, the survey also revealed that the budgets for IT transformation have been increased in the past couple of years by senior-level executives.

With the acceptance of C-LEVEL executives, every businessman knows that digital solutions are crucial for the success of an enterprise. However, the percentage of businesses that invested in a digital transformation strategy is surprisingly less. What’s the major contribution to such a low adoption rate? What’s hindering you from adopting digital transformation solutions?

The last ten years of information technology have been about changing the way people work. The next ten years will be about transforming your business!

A lot of CEOs are afraid that they’ll have to stop their business process while they undergo digital transformation. However, with proper planning and monitoring, you can easily conduct digital transformation in your company while keeping your business running.

Here’s a list of stats that’ll help you decide by yourself:

A report by Adobe & E-consultancy stated that companies with a digital-first approach are 64% more likely to achieve their business goals than their competitors.
According to a case study conducted by Deloitte, 45% of companies tell people that digital transformation has a positive impact on their business and reported higher net revenue growth.
A published article by PwC stated that 52% of the companies plan to cut their defer investment amid the rise of COVID-19, while only 9% are likely to do the same with digital transformation’s budget.

As the statistics suggest, businesses that have adopted digital transformation strategy not only have an edge over their competitors but also allow them to get a higher revenue growth. In this article, you’ll know about five assured ways to tackle digital transformation without downtime. However, before we start, let’s get back to the basics and understand the correct meaning of digital transformation.

The Main Issues of Downtime

For most digital transformation services company owners, downtime is the single biggest reason behind the loss of production time. According to research by Vanson Bourne Research Study, 82% of companies have experienced unplanned downtime at least once over the past three years. Aberdeen’s Research further includes the cost of a company that can go as much as $250,000 an hour. Not just the production, but companies are also facing issues related to productivity, IT, and customer service due to the downtime.

The study by Vanson Bourne also revealed high levels of asset estate ignorance across organizations, wherein 70% of companies lack full awareness due to equipment maintenance, upgradation, or replacement.

The same study also reveals another issue that occurs due to unplanned downtime is that the unplanned downtime results in loss of customer trust and productivity. This loss resulted in a 37% loss in production time and 29% inability to support equipment for production.

When unplanned downtime occurs, no value is generated but the cost of digital transformation grows constantly specifically around overhead operations , which in parallel impacts a company’s bottom line.

The unplanned downtime is the real issue that is pervasive and finding a solution for this downtime gap is a primary step in an organization’s digital maturity and an essential role for a transformative journey.

Road Towards Zero Downtime

As organizations create and invest in their digital transformation business strategy, we are soon entering a time where zero tolerance and zero unplanned downtime will turn into a norm. The key to this is an understanding of and interest in field service management and asset performance management.

As indicated by Vanson Bourne, eight out of ten organizations have effectively perceived that digital tools can improve the visibility of assets and eliminate unplanned downtime. Around half of the organizations confirmed their intent to invest in field service and asset management in the following three years, while 72% claim that zero unplanned downtime is presently the focus of priority.

One of the significant barriers to digital modernization is the challenge to replace systems while maintaining business continuity. To build a strong customer base, and empower employees with modern technical skills, there is a strong need to increase the uptime and follow digital transformation maintenance to bring digital and IT transformation strategy in the business. Let’s look at the ways businesses are overcoming digital transformation challenges and adopting digital business transformation strategy.

5 Ways To Conduct Digital Transformation Without Missing Business

Digital transformation is a sure-shot way for large and successful organizations to stay ahead of their digital-only competitors. That’s why these projects are usually large in ambition and scope, but there are always some chances of risk. With that said, let us take a look at some of the handiest tips that allow you to undergo digital transformation without any downtime

1. Phase-wise Approach

Instead of following the traditional “rip and replace” methodology, you need to approach transformation in a more efficient way to prevent the risk of downtimes. Consider taking a phased approach to reduce the risk in your transformation. You can release a minimum viable product (MVP) into production early to get realistic structural and operational criticism. This phased approach lets you focus on each stage to make changes and develop a customer centric product.

To tackle the digital downtime, the first phase should always be to create and deploy a front-end proxy. The proxy will provide the data. Only after getting the data, you should move to now comes the time for the second phase which includes the replacement of the old stack.

2. Identify Problems Earlier

As downtime can be caused by a native problem, for example, a software glitch in a workstation, remote server, a major event, or any other reason. Thus, for a major transformation phase, you need to build an early warning system to validate and test things in each phase, so that not much time is wasted in detecting the issue and then resolving it.

Identifying problems earlier also helps in having a solution right there, so when the problem occurs then it is easier to correct it without affecting any productivity. With a little bit of testing, iterating, and assessing, you can easily manage traffic to the new system and identify any potential problems earlier.

3. Plan For Accuracy and Reliability

While undergoing a digital transformation, you must visualize, collect, and alert on in-depth operational metrics. It’s better to have a dynamic plan to ensure functional accuracy and operational reliability to minimize the chances of errors and move towards the next step. The plan can involve the right management. Then comes the skill development to streamline standard operations, decrease downtime, allow quick decision-making, enable employees to attain the skill effectively, and improve brand reliability.

The accuracy provides a convenient digital strategy framework to identify important components within the system and reliability helps in decision-making which is meant to upgrade the system availability or reduce the mean duration of system downtime.

4. Establish A Multi-Layered Fallback Mechanism

Multi-Layered Fallback Mechanism helps to reduce the use of the old system while decreasing the impact and elegantly degrading in case of problems. The mechanism helps in a way that the issues arising in one service do not harm overall operations.

During the transformation, you need to make sure that your team gets familiar with the use of new systems to prevent the product or service quality from degrading. That’s why it’s always a good idea to plan for multiple layers of fallback to keep your back covered.

5. Keep Everyone Involved in the Plan

One of the major issues is the skill gap in what needs to be transformed and what is there in the workforce. Thus, to make everyone in your organization understand the process, recognize the process, and agree that it will be worth the efforts, it is important to involve everyone in the plan. Involving the team in a plan helps to track the progress that is being made towards the goal. It helps build trust within the team and provide employees a chance to come up with approaches that they think will work in a way. Also this helps in getting out-of-box ideas from different members, preparing business transformation strategies, and there are chances of not wasting much time in finding a solution or explanation.

The After-Transformation Effect

Although DT is filled with numerous revolutionary technologies, the top ones are the internet of things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data. However, it’s more than just the use of technology – transforming corporate culture and business processes are also an integral part of the digital transformation process.

While it’s easier to manage the disruption created by technology to your business, you also need to make sure that your people can cope up with the changes – and it’s more than just technical skills. It’s more about embracing the change and being resilient and resourceful enough to make decisions faster and better.

If you have any business transformation challenges in your organization, you can partner with a digital transformation agency like Anteelo to take care of the migration and adoption needs. We are a well known brand that builds digital products and processes to help teams get acquainted with changes through the shortest learnability curve. We have served digital transformation companies across the globe including digital transformation companies in USA and parts of the globe.

A New Approach For Designing Citizen Services

Posted on 04/07/202009/06/2021 by Tushar

Most government IT solutions were created only with the intention of automating the back office and focusing on efficiency. Requirements were gathered from case workers and then converted into functionality. The resulting IT solution is entirely focused on the internal operating model.

A similar approach has been taken with most government websites, which are often designed based on a government agency’s internal organisational structure, resulting in a poor user experience for citizens. Far too often, citizens start out on a promising home page, only to get lost in the weeds of dead-end pages, incorrect forms, and even other websites as they try in vain to navigate the unfamiliar organisational structure of the government agency.

But citizens no longer live in an analogue world and they’ve run out of patience. They expect governments to present digital citizen services in an easy-to-use, always-on, self-service, personal, and proactive way.

How to deliver a digital government experience

To deliver an experience that meets expectations, it’s clear that we need another approach — one centred around citizens. Requirements and functionality should be derived from the behaviour of the citizen as a customer – what information or service they need, what problem they need to solve, how they want to consume the content — and not from the organisational setup.

This also means that the government needs to provide a seamless and transparent interaction across channels. There is no time to develop a single application per service. Instead we must think in terms of platform models, where new services can be introduced quickly on top of existing services and a standard approach used to build applications.

This kind of transformation doesn’t just involve technology; it requires the transformation of the government organisation itself to improve how it provides services to its citizens via digital channels. It requires a strategy that is endorsed by the organisation’s leadership and mandates a transformation toward a new operating model, new capabilities and processes.

Balancing front- and back office digital programs

Going digital is not just about revisiting current processes and modernising legacy systems. It is also about balancing programs in the front and back office. This is a critical strategic point. Most digital programs are focused on improving the front office, i.e. the websites or apps that citizens interact with. That’s good insofar as it suggests a focus on citizen interactions. However, that model is unsustainable when the back office continues on as before – manual and labour-intensive, using the same legacy applications, and creating a backlog of requests.

Balance your digital programs with these five enablers

Some governments have already got the message and are redesigning their services with this model in mind. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government has published a set of best practices for designing a good citizen experience. The United States is following along the same lines.

Based on these design principles and drawing on our own experiences working with government organisations, Anteelo has identified five key enablers of successful citizen experience transformation:

Use design thinking. Also called human-centred design, design thinking is a creative problem-solving process that makes the citizen the central focus designing a better experience. It is ideal for tackling front-office related aspects.

Experiment in an agile way. Traditional approaches such as waterfall development take too long to deliver value. An agile, more iterative approach allows for the kinds of experimentation that can lead to process (and application) innovation in both the front- and back-office. This experimentation is a vital component of any digital journey and must be endorsed to get people, processes and technology aligned to optimise the workload.

Invest to drive automation. Governments can greatly benefit from introducing new technologies to automate administrative tasks and interconnect and then dynamically manage public infrastructure. Back-office applications can benefit from a surge in efficiency in applying RPA for example.

Get new digital capabilities. Having the right capabilities and people with knowledge and experience is key to executing a digital transformation program. No organisation will be able to introduce new technologies and change the operating model if it doesn’t have the right capabilities among its workforce.

Become data-driven. Government organisations that embrace data can transform services and become more predictive, proactive, preventive and personalised. Becoming a data-driven organisation also brings internal value. For one thing, greater efficiency means better utilisation of resources. Most of all, it brings value to citizens’ experiences by better understanding their behaviour and engaging them in meaningful interactions.

These enablers, of course, only describe a few key pieces of a more complex puzzle. We explore each enabler in considerably more depth and show how to turn each into concrete actions that drive better citizen outcomes, in our new white paper, Five enablers for governments to serve today’s digital citizens.

Threats and Opportunities in Travel and Transportation from Digital Transformation

Posted on 01/06/202004/06/2021 by Blogs

In travel and transportation most companies today don’t look at customer journeys as a collaborative exercise. They consider their job done when passengers are delivered safely to their appointed destination for their segment. A railway, for example, may only care that it has moved passengers safely from station A to station B. It ignores the fact station B is an airport, and the passengers it dropped off are actually headed to dozens of different destinations.

To deliver real value to customers, companies need to surmount the cultural and technical obstacles to data sharing to create a true transportation ecosystem. The idea of bridging systems, breaking down silos and sharing data with others raises the fear of companies losing their individual value propositions. The reality, however, is that being part of a connected transportation platform will generate more value than it destroys and will create entirely new opportunities for companies that never before existed. What’s needed is a digital enablement strategy.

Looking across a chain of events

Digital transformation is built around an information architecture that enables companies to look across a chain of travel events for an individual customer or package to identify problems, predict the impact, and automatically develop and execute solutions that keep passengers and freight moving.

New services can be built around a platform like this that help companies differentiate their offerings or add value in new ways, through mobile tracking solutions, or by using analytics to improve warehousing fulfillment and distribution. For examples, sensors in a refrigerated freight car that can sense an elevation in temperature could trigger a maintenance request to repair a problem or move cargo to another car before it spoils.

Passenger transportation companies can tap into these same tools to find ways to extend their brands and expand into the multiple modes of transportation available to passengers. Digital enablement helps companies understand the full passenger journey and allows for a seamless approach, even if the company is not part of the entire chain of events. A hotel notified that incoming guests are experiencing delays could offer weary travelers an added comfort or convenience as a way to differentiate their customer service.

Capabilities like this don’t require wholesale integration. They can be developed and delivered through loosely connected systems that share selected data, understand the most important attributes of a customer’s journey, and have the awareness to detect issues, the context to recognize the impact and the intelligence to take action.

Dimensions of change in the digital workplace

Posted on 26/02/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Upgrade workplace technology: check. Modernize infrastructure: check. Adjust to new workforce: check. Overcome resistance to new ways of working: check. Adjusting to digital transformation’s impact on the workplace and workers is, well, a lot of work. A lot of change. And it’s essential to understand that workplace transformation will only deliver expected business benefits when organizations develop effective ways to cope with change along many dimensions. These include:

Workforce. For the last few years, we have focused on the generational shift taking place as millennials become the bulk of the workforce. However, there is a second shift that will impact how we operate. Organizations are adopting more gig workers for specific tasks or projects, which puts pressure on IT to streamline gig workers’ experience and optimize processes to maximize gig workers’ productivity. Capitalizing on automation, intelligence, and integration to optimize business flows and processes will become fundamental to IT operations.

Human resources. This blended workforce, and the recognition that organizations are already adopting a task or gig-like approach internally, impacts the way we run our Human Resources processes. The line manager might continue as a custodian, but the management chain becomes flatter, tied to activities and projects. The old reporting model breaks by having so many stakeholders and managers. We need to automate and collate information for the relevant project and stakeholder, distill it succinctly, and publish it to those who are invested, as well as archive it as input to the performance review process.

Project management. That information will enable project managers and stakeholders to better manage the individual and the team, optimizing for performance and cost. As they see near-real-time information about productivity and performance (on their specific project), they can flex, coach, and change the team as needed. It is a much more hands-on world, although some of the tasks can be automated. Project resource managers can learn from just-in-time manufacturing techniques, bringing in the right folks at the time they are needed.

Relevant information. In this environment, relevant information — not more information — is the key. Luckily, the platforms citizen developers are experimenting with also provide some of the components needed. They can capture tasks done, documents touched and discussions held, giving us a raw feed of activity. Post-process this information, in the context of each stakeholder, can be used to produce concise, relevant reports grounded in system data, not flawed memories.

Embrace employee-driven innovation. Organizations must become better at matching the pace of change, using techniques like employee-driven innovation to quickly identify new workplace trends and opportunities. Formalizing informal support networks can help manage change more effectively and capture the benefits of disruption. And when companies understand how productivity and morale are boosted by ongoing workplace investments, the cost of change is less daunting and easier to justify.

Connection and collaboration. Companies must continue to develop policies that give workers flexibility in the devices they chose to use. How people connect and collaborate is changing as well; companies will need to foster collaboration on, and set policies for, social media in the enterprise.

Automation. Software agents, bots and intelligent machines will make tasks easier. Companies will need to consider how these new devices and applications can learn and apply user preferences, and how they can use real-time information in context to automate more tasks and decisions.

Enterprises can truly change the way employees work by providing a flexible, expansive workplace with the right technologies and policies. Those who come to grips with the new definition of the workplace and its enabling technologies will be the digital leaders of tomorrow.

Here’s how a digital core enables industry-wide digital transformation

Posted on 25/02/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Companies in every industry are facing the challenge of evolving digital capabilities given their current operating models, resources, talent and culture. These elements are so intrinsic that any digital transformation not addressing them will ultimately fail because the legacy organization will inevitably exert a gravitational pull back to established practices, while agile competitors forge ahead. Some enterprises may be further along than others, but in most industries there are only a few companies that have made significant progress.

Becoming a digital enterprise is a complex and lengthy journey. It is much more than implementing predictive analytics or intuitive eCommerce experiences. Beyond product/service innovation, the journey demands attitude change in agility, experimentation, openness and transparency. However, for now let us focus on the digital core levers that CIOs and their teams can use to accelerate transformation –and how industries’ different use of digital enablers leads to different routes to digitilization.

Digital core enablers – technologies that realize digital transformation

As I explained in the first blog of this series, a digital core represents a set of loosely coupled cloud-enabled and SaaS business applications integrated with analytics and big data, on top of an elastic, yet resilient, data platform. A digitalized enterprise core enables a scalable, enterprise-wide digital strategy with the intent to accelerate business innovation through insight-based customer, partner and employee engagement. This transparency and automation drives optimization of business process and asset utilization, as well as employee productivity, and allows forays into new business models beyond the industry.

The digital core components accelerate the benefits of digital transformation by:

Enabling creation of engaging and effective customer, employee and partner “experiences,” leading to adaptable, collaborative transactions
Optimizing end-to-end business processes, even extending them beyond the enterprise to improve business efficiency and effectiveness
Innovating current business models that open potential for net-new revenue from products and/or services in unexplored market segments or via cross-industry collaboration and/or digital business platforms.

Digital core demands a hybrid transactional and analytics data platform

So, where should most enterprises start? While the hype about cloud-native, loosely coupled microservice applications is raging, there is a quiet revolution taking place enabling the sensible modernization of a business operational core. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, IBM, Workday, Salesforce and other vendors are increasingly offering “in-process,” hybrid transactional and analytical business applications based on optimized, ACID-compliant, columnar databases sharing one data platform. These merged platforms support data harmonization and application consolidation from a value stream perspective into one data store — with significant impact on TCO. In-process applications leveraging translytical data platforms or hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) accelerated by in-memory computing are disruptive. Companies can optimize business process execution by meshing many of the digital core enablers like real-time analytics (for example, planning, forecasting, outcome simulations and what-if analysis) in transactional execution, rather than performing them as separate activities after the fact.

Beyond this potential transition route to a digital core by consolidating applications into transanalytical data platforms, big data (Apache Hadoop) repositories can complement the reach of core applications by infusing additional external or sensor-based data to transition from manual to sense-and-respond, event-driven processes. As shown in the graphic below, these digital enablers may even “blur” the boundaries between industries, therefore enabling cross-sector collaboration.

Digital enablers disrupt industries and break down boundaries

Recent disruptive competitive moves by Amazon into transportation and financial services reinforced the importance of establishing a hybrid data platform that drives internal optimization and allows competitive moves into new services and products.

While different industrial sectors have a natural proximity to some of the digital enablers shown below, there is a rising consensus that the transparency and insight provided by richer data in analytical and big data repositories are the “fuel” of automation. Most of the technologies highlighted as disruptive in the graph below revolve around the utilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Becoming digital – a maturity and context-based approach per industry

Recently, researchers from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) looked at the state of digitization in sectors across the United States and Europe and found significant gaps between many of them. Most digital companies see outsized growth in productivity and profit margins. But what are the key attributes of these digital leaders, and how can companies benchmark themselves against competitors? MGI’s digitization index encompasses (a) digitization of assets, including infrastructure, connected machines, data, and data platforms, (b) digitization of business operations, including processes, payment and business models, customer and supply chain interactions and (c) digitization of the workforce, including worker use of digital tools, digitally skilled workers and new digital jobs and roles.

The industry digitization dashboard below shows the digitization maturity scores. The IT technology sector comes out on top. Media, finance and professional services are right behind. Not surprisingly, these are some of the industries that currently invest in cognitive AI for operations and services, which in many ways demand a rapid modernization of their business operational cores.

No doubt the extent to which companies are digitizing their physical assets and supply chains and enabling their knowledge workers — that is, if they have smart buildings, connected vehicle fleets, big data or IoT systems and information at their employees’ fingertips – determines the performance they get out of equipment, systems, and business networks. However, different states of maturity with such enablers demand a varied approach by industry. For example:

A consumer-products company will benefit from focusing its data and automation efforts on establishing a synchronized supply network able to respond to events from their customers. The fourth recommendation above shows that digitization of the B2B channel through “intelligent shelves” will improve forecast accuracy and trade promotion efficiency and evolve from a make-to-stock model into a make-to-order product flow. That in return will demand a transition from forecasting to response planning and big data repositories that sense, categorize and act upon on-shelf shortages. Product and packaging fragmentation will further demand digitization of the heart of manufacturing.
Asset-intensive industries like utilities can leverage AI to drive improved matching of supply and demand, which needs to be done, literally, in real time. With the addition of smart metering sensors, utilities have been able to progress from forecasted to actual consumption billing, but more importantly, to increase accuracy of their short-term load forecasts in order to adjust supply to meet anticipated demand. This delivers substantial savings, reduces waste and emissions and adds further system resilience via predictive and preventive maintenance.
Service- and labor-intensive industries like retail need to improve their interactions with consumers by improving the omni-channel experience and empowering their employees towards higher productivity via mobile-enabled tools, while collecting and bargaining using the wealth of information on behavior and assortment. Efficient logistics, goods tagging and placement can be automated.

In summary, by understanding their digital maturity vis-à-vis their peers and even related industries, companies can streamline the deployment of a digital core, focusing on business model optimization or innovation while enhancing their business network experience. Easier deployment of digital enablers is one of the benefits of a modernized digital core. Advanced analytics, IoT, AI/ML, robotics, algorithmic operations and blockchain can transform how companies create and manage digital assets, accelerate supply-to-demand, facilitate digital experiences and empower digital workers towards higher productivity.

In my next blog post, I’ll write about how a digital business platform extends an enterprise’s digital core into the broader business network and allows for end-to-end value stream optimization of current operations.

How Can Mobile Apps Help Your Company’s Digital Transformation?

Posted on 20/02/201921/06/2021 by Anteelo Master

Irrespective of which industry you look at, you will find entrepreneurs hustling to kickstart their digital transformation efforts which have been lying in the backdrop since several business years. While a considerably easy move when you have to alter your digital offering according to the customers’ needs, things become a little difficult when you start planning digital transformation for your business. A difficulty that mobile applications can solve.

There are two prime elements which businesses need to focus on when planning to digitally transform their workflow and workforce: adaptability and portability. And by bringing their processes and communications on mobile apps, they are able to hit both the targets in one go.

Here are some statistics looking into why enterprises need to count mobile application in, in their digital transformation strategy –

Although the above graph should be a reason enough to take mobile apps seriously, there are some other numbers as well.

57% of the digital media use comes in through apps.
On an average, any smartphone user has over 80 apps out of which they use 40 apps every month.
21% of millennials visit a mobile application 50+ times everyday.

While the statistics establish the rising growth of mobile apps, what we intend to cover in the article is the pivotal role mobile applications play in digital business transformation. To understand it from the entirety, we will first have to look into what is digital transformation and what it entails.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation means using digital technologies for changing how a business operates, fundamentally. It offers businesses a chance to reimagine how they engage with the customers, how they create new processes, and ultimately how they deliver value.

The true capabilities of introducing digital transformation in business lies in making a company more agile, lean, and competitive. The end of the long term commitment results in several benefits.

Benefits of digital transformation for a business

Greater efficiency – leveraging new technologies for automating processes leads to greater efficiency, which in turn, lowers the workforce requirements and cost-saving processes.
Better decision making – through digitalized information, businesses can tap in the insights present in data. This, in turn, helps management make informed decisions on the basis of quality intelligence.
Greater reach – digitalization opens you to omni-channel presence which enables your customers to access your services or products from across the globe.
Intuitive customer experience – digital transformation gives you the access to use data for understanding your customers better enabling you to know their needs and delivering them a personalized experience.

Merging mobile app capabilities with digital transformation outcomes

The role of mobile applications can be introduced in all the areas which are also often the key areas of digital transformation challenges that an enterprise faces.

Technology integration
Better customer experience
Improved operations
Changed organizational structure

When you partner with a digital transformation consulting firm that holds an expertise in enterprise app development, they work around all these above-mentioned areas in addition to shaping their digital transformation roadmap around technology, process, and people.

In addition to a seamless integration with the digital transformation strategy of an enterprise, there are a number of reasons behind the growing need to adopt digital transformation across sectors. Ones that encompasses and expands beyond the reasons to invest in enterprise mobility solutions.

The multitude of reasons, cumulatively, makes mobility a prime solution offering of the US digital transformation market.

How are mobile apps playing a role in advancing businesses’ internal digital transformation efforts?

1. By utilizing AI in mobile apps

The benefits of using AI for bettering customer experience is uncontested. Through digital transformation, businesses have started using AI for developing intuitive mobile apps using technologies like natural language processing, natural language generation, speech recognition technology, chatbots, and biometrics.

AI doesn’t just help with automation of processes and with predictive, preventative analysis but also with serving customers in a way they want to be served.

2. An onset of IoT mobile apps

The time when IoT was used for displaying products and sharing information is sliding by. The use cases of mobile apps in the IoT domain is constantly expanding.

Enterprises are using IoT mobile apps to operate smart equipment in their offices and making the supply chains efficient, transparent. While still a new entrant in the enterprise sector, IoT mobile apps are finding ways to strengthen their position in the business world.

3. Making informed decisions via real-time analytics

In the current business world, access to real-time analytics can give you a strong competitive advantage. Mobile applications are a great way for businesses to collect users’ data and engage with them through marketing transformation messages designed around the analytics based on their app journey.

You can use real-time analytics to know how your teams are performing, analyze their productivity, and get a first-hand view into the problems they are facing in performing a task and how it’s impacting the overall business value.

4. Greater portability

Portability in an enterprise ecosystem enables employees to work as per their convenience. While it shows less impact in the short term, in the long run, it plays a huge role in how productive a team is.

By giving employees the space to work as per the time and location of their choice, you give them the space to boost their creativity fuel and in turn productivity. One of the results of using software that enabled our employees to work according to their terms and conveniences for us was greater business expansion ideas and an increase in overall productivity of the workforce.

Tips to consider when making mobile apps a part of the digital transformation strategy

If at this stage, you are convinced that mobile applications are a key part of digital transformation efforts, here are some tips that can help your strategies for increasing the ROI on your enterprise app –

Adopt mobile-first approach – the key factor that separates enterprise apps that are winning is how they don’t treat apps as the extension of their websites. Their software development process is strictly mobile-only. This in turn shapes their entire design, development, and testing processes.

Identifying the scope of mobility – the next tip that digital transformation consulting firms would give you is analyzing the operations and workflows for understanding which teams, departments, or functions would benefit from mobility the most. You should not start reinventing a process which works okay, you should look for areas which can be streamlined, automated, or valued through mobility.

Outsourcing digital transformation efforts – when we were preparing An Entrepreneur’s Guide on Outsourcing Digital Transformation article, we looked into several benefits of outsourcing digitalization to a digital transformation strategy consulting agency. But the prime benefit revolved around saving businesses’ efforts and time which goes into solving challenges like – absence of digital skillset, limitations of the agile transformation process, or the inability to let go of the legacy systems.

8 Digital Transformation Trends to Watch

Posted on 30/01/201919/06/2021 by Tushar

As businesses try to adjust to the new normal, many will be looking to technology to help them move forward. Digital transformation trends can give enterprises a competitive advantage but investing wisely means keeping abreast of innovations and up-to-date with trends and developments. To help, here are some of the main digital transformation trends keeping boardrooms excited.

Analytics

Analytics has transformed the decision-making process, providing data and insights that help businesses identify problems, opportunities and solutions. The vast quantities of data available for analysis, including real-time data, means companies which don’t make use of it are at a serious disadvantage. It has applications in all areas of business: procurement, operations, logistics, marketing, communications, security, finance and HR; and with sophisticated analytics tools easily deployable in the cloud, it’s becoming much more widely used.

AI and machine Learning

AI and machine learning trends are the ideal partners for data analytics and enable businesses to do much more with their data. They speed up analysis, automate large scale processing in the scalable cloud and remove the bottleneck caused by human analysts. They also learn and adapt from previous analyses while providing results in user-friendly, easily digested, graphical interfaces that non-IT staff can make sense of.

5G

While the consumer generally sees 5G as a way to improve smartphone c

onnections and speed up downloads, the deployment of 5G infrastructure will have a much wider impact that many businesses can benefit from. It will, for example, hasten the development of IoT infrastructures, such as smart cities, intelligent transport networks, smart vehicles and smart industry. At the same time, we’ll see a wider range of connected devices, making it easier for businesses to take advantage of the IoT and the valuable data it generates.

Wi-Fi 6

The next generation of wi-fi, known as both Wi-Fi 6 and AX Wi-Fi, provides up to three times faster processing and wireless connection speeds. Even better, it enables networks to handle far more connected devices, which is helpful considering the proliferation in wi-fi enabled gadgets being used in the workplace and the increasing amounts of data they send and receive.

Blockchain

Although it’s often associated with cryptocurrencies, blockchain has many valuable uses in businesses, such as tracking the origin and movement of goods in the supply chain and providing financial audit trails. It has applications in healthcare, real-estate, media, energy and local government and can be used for a wide range of purposes.

The reason for its increased use lies in the number of service providers, including Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, who are developing subscription-based ‘blockchain-as-a-service’ platforms and thus making it easier for businesses to put it to good use.

Robotics and automation

There is a historical pattern of businesses shifting towards automation in response to a recession. Following the 2008 crash, for example, 25% of supermarket checkout assistants in the UK were replaced by automated self-service checkouts. The crisis following the 2020 pandemic is likely to see the pattern repeated, however, with more advanced robotic processes and AI interfaces available, more skilled workers could see the brunt of redundancies. Where roles aren’t completely replaced, workloads may be reduced, enabling existing staff to be upskilled.

Connected transport

Although this is only happening on a small scale at the moment, automated and remote-controlled transport is already taking place. Drones are being used to ship medicines to remote Scottish islands, restaurants and supermarkets have been using automated robots, developed by a Cambridge company, to make local deliveries during the lockdown and the UK coastguard has just announced plans to use drones to assist with coastal searches.

Expect to see these technologies becoming more widely available and, thanks to 5G, being put to uses in more places. Many businesses can take advantage of these technologies, helping them deliver products and services quicker and without the need for a third-party delivery company.

Customer experience

According to a survey by Adobe, senior executives see customer experience as a bigger priority than investment in new products and services as it offers significantly more opportunities for growth. The key areas where development will take place are in omnichannel shopping, personalisation and frictionless payment, with technologies like data analytics and AI providing the insights needed to deploy these in the way that customers will appreciate.

By enhancing the customer experience, brands can develop both loyalty and trust. As a result, customers will engage more, share their needs and give feedback, enabling companies to develop their products and services in response.

Conclusion

Digital transformation not only affects all sectors; it also has an impact on all aspects of a company’s operations. Those that adopt and utilise the technologies mentioned here can reap the enormous benefits they offer. Being able to make use of these technologies, however, requires companies to make use of the cloud, as it is here where they are most easily and affordably accessible.

Cloud Necessary for Digital Transformation? – Here’s Why!

Posted on 09/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

Across the globe, organisations are acknowledging the need for digital transformation as new technologies, like data analytics, AI, ML and the IoT make traditional processes redundant and force unprogressive companies out of business. At the same time, shifting customer needs and behaviours demand companies undertake digital transformation in order to evolve. Without the adoption of cloud technology, however, much of this would not be possible. Here, we’ll explain why.

Organisations which have migrated to the cloud and undergone digital transformation experience both significant growth and improved efficiency. It has enabled them to develop new business models that keep them relevant and thriving in today’s dynamic and volatile marketplace. Thanks to cloud technology, they can innovate at pace, make informed, data-driven decisions and speed up the launch of products and services. What’s more, this is achieved more cost-effectively and efficiently.

1. Cost-effective IT solution

The cloud provides organisations with the opportunity to develop a much more cost-effective business model where the need to invest heavily in IT infrastructure is no longer required. By hosting their services and carrying out workloads on the infrastructure of their service provider, not only do they replace significant capital expenditure with less expensive service packages; they also forego many of the associated costs of operating a datacentre, including machine maintenance and server management.

2. Agility

The speed at which servers and software can be deployed in the cloud and the rapidity with which applications can be developed, tested and launched helps drive business growth. Additionally, this agility enables organisations to concentrate on more business-focused issues, such as security and compliance, product development or monitoring and analysis, instead of using up precious time and effort provisioning and maintaining IT resources. Together, these cloud attributes give companies a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

3. Scalability

Another key advantage that cloud brings to digital transformation is instant scalability. It provides businesses with a cost-effective, pay-per-use way of scaling up, on-demand, to ensure it always has the resources it needs to cope with spikes or to carry out large workloads. This means the expensive practice of purchasing additional servers to cater for busy periods but which are left redundant for much of the time is no longer necessary.

4. High availability

Today’s customers demand uninterrupted, 24/7 access to products and services and putting this in place is a key aim of many companies’ digital transformation. Similarly, some businesses rely on critical apps for processes, such as manufacturing, that also need to be operational at all times. What the cloud brings here is guaranteed high availability of 100% uptime. As cloud servers are virtual, instances can be moved between hardware and this means that downtime due to server failure becomes a thing of the past for cloud users. Indeed, even if an entire datacentre goes offline because of a natural disaster, service can be maintained by moving the instances to a datacentre in another geographical location.

5. Security and compliance

Security and compliance are a high priority for all companies and are often a major challenge to those with in-house systems that lack both the budget and expertise to put effective measures into place.

The cloud can play a significant role in improving both security and compliance. Service providers employ highly skilled security experts and deploy advanced tools to protect their customer’s systems and data and to comply with their own stringent regulations. This ensures cloud users operate in highly secure environments, protected by next-gen firewalls with intrusion prevention systems and in-flow virus protection that detect and isolate threats before they reach a client’s server.

6. Built-in technology upgrades

Keeping up with the Joneses as far as technology is concerned is always a challenge for organisations, not simply for the cost of regularly purchasing newer hardware, but also the effort of migrating applications and data during the process.

By adopting cloud technology, companies no longer have this issue. Service providers regularly update their hardware in order to remain competitive themselves and this ensures that their customers benefit from always having the latest technology, such as Xeon processors and SSD hard drives, at their disposal. What’s more, virtualisation means any migration to new hardware takes place unnoticed.

7. Collaboration and remote working

Digital transformation involves the replacing of outdated working practices and legacy systems with those that support innovation and agility. The cloud is the ideal environment for this, providing both the ability for remote working and improved collaboration. Many cloud-based platforms have been developed with collaboration in mind, offering video conferencing, file sharing, syncing and project management tools for teams to use in and out of the office. Files are instantly updated and are available anywhere with a connection; privileges and authentication can be determined for every employee, and projects, people and progress can be monitored and tracked.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is fast becoming a necessity for organisations, providing the means to help them be more agile, innovative, cost-effective and competitive while being better able to meet the needs of their customers. Cloud technology is instrumental in bringing this about as it offers the ideal environment in which to deploy the technologies and undertake the workloads on which digital transformation depends.

The Dedicated Server : Role in Digital Transformation

Posted on 07/01/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

When businesses think of digital transformation, cloud migration is often the first thing that comes to mind. Indeed, the cloud is a necessary requirement: it’s cost-effective, easily scalable and puts the latest technologies, like data analytics, automation, AI, ML and IoT at your fingertips. However, if you intend to deploy the best technology for the task at hand, the dedicated server still has an important role to play. Here, we’ll look at why dedicated servers are a key element in digital transformation.

Security

Data is the driving force behind digital transformation. Companies are collecting it in greater quantities than ever before to analyse it and discover the insights that lead to improvements in operations, marketing, finance, procurement and many other areas of the business.

However, while the cloud is the best place in which to carry out analytics, for some organisations, it is not necessarily the best place to store the data, especially personal and sensitive data. That’s not to say that the cloud is less secure than a dedicated server, both can be configured to the same exacting security standards. At eukhost, for example, we can offer the same protection for both, using next-gen FortiGate firewalls whose advanced security features include intrusion detection, anti-malware, DDoS protection, VPN and DMZ.

The difference lies in the needs of the individual company. If your business stores personal or sensitive information and has to comply with regulations such as GDPR, you may require a data storage solution that, unlike the public cloud, is not multi-tenancy. The role of the dedicated server here is that its single-tenancy storage offers greater compliance with stringent regulations. Additionally, some hosts, like eukhost, can develop and implement a security policy that meets both your internal and regulatory requirements, providing services that include intrusion detection and prevention, application firewall configuration, DDoS protection, email security and more.

In a world where cybercriminals are using ever more sophisticated tools, such as Ransomware as a Service, and where the number of cyberattacks involving data theft is continually on the rise, a dedicated server could be a wisely chosen component of your digital transformation infrastructure.

Performance

The other chief reason for deploying a dedicated server is that digital transformation often requires organisations to run resource-heavy applications which they will need to perform flawlessly. While the cloud does offer very high performance, our cloud VM’s underlying hardware, for example, features Xeon E5-2600s with 8 to 12 cores, for organisations which need it, a dedicated server can offer even greater performance.

The main reason for this is that you can define your own specification and build a bespoke dedicated server that perfectly matches your CPU, RAM and storage requirements. You have a choice of core or frequency optimised CPUs or both; single, dual or quad processors; and SSD storage and PCIe based drives. You can choose the processor speed and the number of cores and disks, giving you complete control of your environment.

For organisations needing to run resource-heavy applications, a dedicated server offers the best performance. Your applications will run faster, with those which rely on database access, like CMS, carrying out non-cached queries and data writes much quicker. With SSDs installed, a dedicated server can perform thousands of simultaneous reads and writes without the application having to wait around for the storage, as it would with HDDs. In addition, backups and restoration will be performed quicker and your server will respond more rapidly.

Other benefits of dedicated servers

Dedicated servers come as part of a hosting package and these provide organisations with other important benefits. This includes cost-effective server management with round the clock monitoring and maintenance of your system; geographical redundancy, off-site backup and replication services; and, importantly, 24 x 7 x 365 expert technical support, so that if you have an issue, it can be dealt with straight away.

Not a solution for every workload

Of course, a digitally transformed company needs to use the best technology for each workload and a dedicated server is not the number one choice for everything. While its single tenancy provides enhanced security and bespoke hardware offers superior performance, the virtualisation technology employed in the cloud makes it better for running mission-critical applications that need high availability rates of 100% uptime. Similarly, the cloud is also the better environment for workloads which need quick and easily scalable resources to cope with unexpected spikes in demand. Indeed, its pay as you go charging structure also makes this highly cost-effective.

Conclusion

For companies seeking the right technology for their digital transformation, dedicated servers have an important role to play. They offer the best solution for running resource-heavy applications and provide a secure, single tenancy storage environment for personal and sensitive data. The latest hosting packages ensure that companies have access to the best hardware and the most advanced security tools while being able to take advantage of server management solutions, backup and replication services, and around the clock support.

Ways for airlines to benefit from combining digital and live agents.

Posted on 05/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

Many of us have had an experience similar to this: You call an airline to make a reservation and get a digital agent on the phone. The call starts off fine, but when you ask if your friend can sit next to you on the flight, the digital agent stalls and sends you to a live agent. You then wait several minutes before you reach a live agent and, when you finally do, she has no call history and you have to start from scratch, explaining who you are and making the reservation a second time.

Eventually, your request gets resolved and you manage to book your flight. But the entire process takes more time than you would have preferred, and you’re left irritated and feeling like you’ll switch airlines the next time.

Situations like these occur because many airlines have separate systems for the digital agent and the live agent, often from different providers whose contracts restrict the integration of both systems. When the two systems don’t communicate with one another, the digital agent hands the call off to a live agent, and the information doesn’t transfer. Airlines are now working to integrate both systems, and there are at least five benefits to doing so:

1. Saves the customer time. Customers don’t have to start from scratch and can complete their reservation request in much less time.

2. More efficient use of the agent’s time. When the customer saves time, so does the agent, which gives her more time to upsell the customer on other services or deals the airline has to offer. The live agent can transition to becoming more of a salesperson and problem solver than a mere order taker.

3. More efficient back-end processing. In the past, any time a change was made the airline would have to input the change into two separate systems. Now, the change gets entered only once and both systems get the update.

4. Improved brand loyalty. The customer will remember his issue was resolved quickly and the live agent had a complete call history and knew and understood the customer’s preferences.

5. Personalized service. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will enable the system to learn more about the customer over time. For example, it might know immediately the customer’s seat preferences based on her flight time – towards the front of the plane on a connecting flight, at the back on the red-eye, or in the aisle during a daytime flight –so that when the customer books a future flight with the digital agent, the correct seat will be assigned automatically.

As the system matures, fewer calls would need to be routed to a live agent, so that only the most exceptional requests, or those involving sensitive information (such as a declined credit card), would need to be transferred.

A centralized platform is the most effective tool for integrating digital agents and live agents. It can connect disparate applications, services, and processes under a uniform customer experience, helping airlines to ensure data compliance, easily transform data, and more efficiently route information.

That said, integrating live and digital agents is a challenge, with legacy systems and processes often hindering progress. But the overall goals of an integrated system –improved customer service, brand loyalty and the ability of live agents to upsell services that customers really want – are well worth the effort.

When airlines succeed in doing this, they can win customers for life.

The Main Issues of Downtime

Road Towards Zero Downtime

5 Ways To Conduct Digital Transformation Without Missing Business

1. Phase-wise Approach

2. Identify Problems Earlier

3. Plan For Accuracy and Reliability

4. Establish A Multi-Layered Fallback Mechanism

5. Keep Everyone Involved in the Plan

The After-Transformation Effect

How to deliver a digital government experience

Balancing front- and back office digital programs

Balance your digital programs with these five enablers

Looking across a chain of events

Digital core enablers – technologies that realize digital transformation

Digital core demands a hybrid transactional and analytics data platform

Digital enablers disrupt industries and break down boundaries

Becoming digital – a maturity and context-based approach per industry

What is digital transformation?

Benefits of digital transformation for a business

Merging mobile app capabilities with digital transformation outcomes

1. By utilizing AI in mobile apps

2. An onset of IoT mobile apps

3. Making informed decisions via real-time analytics

4. Greater portability

Tips to consider when making mobile apps a part of the digital transformation strategy

Analytics

AI and machine Learning

5G

Wi-Fi 6

Robotics and automation

Connected transport

Customer experience

Conclusion

1. Cost-effective IT solution

2. Agility

3. Scalability

4. High availability

5. Security and compliance

6. Built-in technology upgrades

7. Collaboration and remote working

Conclusion

Security

Performance

Other benefits of dedicated servers

Not a solution for every workload

Conclusion

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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