3 min readAdopting to more and more technological changes, people now require immediate, accurate, and seamless experiences no matter the service source or conditions. Markets themselves are evolving and changing to meet this demand, pushing the global economy to a bifurcation point—and digital transformation will be the new global market reality.
Research conducted by CEB covers “a comprehensive analysis of the business model, consumer and workforce changes that will have the greatest impact on the digital enterprise by 2020.” This report details six different shifts that will lead digital transformation across industries, geographic areas, customer personas, and operating models. These new challenges for leaders of digital transformation and triggers for enterprise digitization are:
- Maintaining personalization when scaling business, as demand becomes more personal;
- Developing service-type solutions (e.g. subscriptions) or interfaces for providing customers with easy access to different products;
- As data reliance deepens, meeting an onslaug ht of new data with objective and efficient decision-making;
- Automating not only low value activities but high value business skills such as consulting, design, strategic planning, and business development;
- Merging industries and cross-industry services as external and internal boundaries blur, creating cross-functional skills to support new business models; and
- Keeping up with acceleration, developing processes and strategies to fit a continuously changing market landscape.
Though the market paradigm’s shift towards market digitalization is appealing, the need to face and adopt changes can vary throughout markets and industry players. When it comes to digital transformation there are digital leaders and digital laggards.
While some performers excel at digital transformation, the major market landscape shows many to be lagging behind, struggling with the basics of the digital customer experience and new technologies disrupting their business.
The unsuccessful adoption of digital trends is deeper than a company’s unwillingness or unawareness of meeting this need.
Often, companies lack expertise in market trends and/or in-house technological solutions, barring them from easily adopting emerging technologies. They also might struggle to understand which of these shifts are most important for their business in general. Making such decisions is an essential first step in deciding how and where digitization will create the most business value. It’s also possible that key market players prefer not to risk at all, sabotaging transformation initiatives from the inside.
This strategy is always a losing option. As Kevin Benedict says:
When digital laggards finally recognize the degree of market disruption caused by the rapid a doption of digital technologies, and desperately try to outrun the inescapable Darwinian effect of their slow response, they fall far behind the expectations of customers and market trends, as the digital leaders transformation gap evolves into a chasm.
But companies can shift the paradigm and enable their business transformation if they take active measures to develop innovative and scalable digital strategies. It will help to put them in step with those taking control of market changes, aligning their company’s business with digital transformation trends.
To go deeper into how SoftServe sees companies at different stages of digital transformation maturity please see our next article.