By Ricardo Rocha, Associate Marketing Director at Noesis
"Digital Transformation" and "Digital Acceleration" are more than buzzwords in the IT sector, they are the definition of the movement we have witnessed in recent years, across all organizations and sectors of activity. At first, Digital Transformation, the effort to transform the business, business models, organizational dynamics, the relationship with customers, using technology and focusing on efficiency and increasing competitiveness.
"Digital Transformation" and "Digital Acceleration" are more than buzzwords in the IT sector, they are the definition of the movement we have witnessed in recent years, across all organizations and sectors of activity. At first, Digital Transformation, the effort to transform the business, business models, organizational dynamics, the relationship with customers, using technology and focusing on efficiency and increasing competitiveness.
Then, "acceleration", because "transformation" is already a sine qua non condition for the survival of organizations and the differentiating factor has become the speed of this transformation, the ability to adapt and the agility in change. An even greater sense of urgency, given the context we live in 2020. IT (and Digital) is no longer a "silo" within organizations, focused on technical issues, under the responsibility of "IT professionals", to to be on the business "radar", from top management to operational management, from marketing to sales, at the center of decision making and influencing business performance. The digital transformation directly impacts the business and this is increasingly clear in any organization.
Technological investments are not just "cost" and increasingly drive value creation. IT investment and investment priorities must have this driver: to drive value creation in an organization. In this way, the main trends in IT are increasingly oriented towards creating value. The need for the business to be increasingly agile and quickly adaptable to drastic changes in context or market, has awakened organizations to Low-Code, which allows them to quickly develop applications, reducing time-to-market.
It is not enough to look conservatively at the business technological stack with the same sense of application of time and urgency as before, where projects were carried out with average terms of 6 months or 1 year. Today, development roadmaps are measured weeks or even days. Build fast-Fail Faster is the motto to develop, adapt, configure business applications, allowing you to quickly test workflows and avoid investing months (and euros) in a development that, in the end, does not meet the requirements of the business.
This need for rapid development also requires greater demands on the quality of application delivery, which will imply greater investment in quality assurance, and in the implementation of Quality Management models, with the automation of tests taking on a fundamental role. On the other hand, Data, increasingly at the center of organizations and decision-making processes, should be a focus of IT investment.
Acting on the data we collect from customers, consumption patterns, among other variables, as well as the bet on AI and Machine Learning models for the construction of predictive and forecast models are some of the areas that most contribute to increasing the competitiveness of companies. organizations. It is the data that give intelligence to organizations and that allow them to make better decisions, with evident benefits for the business.
When it comes to interactions as a customer, the customer experience is "the" theme. Whether as a resource to chatbots that simplify the search and the provision of information or the resolution of some issues. Whether betting on technology associated with authentication, validation, digital signature or document certification, which allows simplifying all bureaucratic and contractual formalization processes, for example, or even using technology to enhance the consumer experience and its interactions with the brand, through tools that allow to characterize consumption profiles, program and communicate in a different and automated way with customers and potential customers.
All this acceleration and transformation also poses challenges in terms of the resilience of the IT infrastructure. Its correct adaptation, using the cloud and hybrid cloud models, are also investments that cannot be overlooked. Still in this context, the increasing complexity of the technological ecosystem and this accelerated transformation, poses new challenges for integration and middleware, with the need to integrate all of these systems, guarantee their uniformity and ensure efficient communication between different data sources, platforms and channels digital.
Finally, but never last, cybersecurity must be on the agenda, a consequence of the growing number of attacks and threats, which are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. The organizations that are able to master these aspects, balancing the investment to be made with the appropriate technological choices, which allow them to leverage their digital strategy, will be the ones that will most quickly recover and create value.
Originally publish (in Portuguese) in business.IT
