Digitize your company to protect your core business

Digitization is disrupting industries and companies across the economy. ICT groups must help their companies take advantage of this trend. Infrastructure that fosters collaboration can drive end-to-end digitization that creates operating efficiencies and results in delighted customers.

Your company can become digitized if, for example, you:

• Keep focus on your core business instead of on infrastructure and network services.
• Automate and deploy customer self-service so that, in the case of a lending company for instance, a customer can get a mortgage application approved in real-time.
• Offer personalized services and products that are customized to customers’ needs.
• Rationalize, automate and scale what were formerly paper-based, manual processes, enhancing the company’s control over its operations and limiting its risks. Or design new, entirely digital processes.
• Deploy data models to draw actionable customer insights and performance analysis from operating data.
• Mine “Big Data” i.e. disparate structured and unstructured data including social media, text, video and other kinds of information that complements your operating data.
• Implement algorithms to support routine decision making.

Accomplishing this ambitious agenda requires a digital vision to shape each end-to-end business process, a road map to get there and rapid development of digital prototypes. Old mindsets, habits and behaviors must change. Salesmen may try to resist customer self-service. Groups that have previously worked in separate silos need to collaborate.

ICT’s mission must be to provide platforms that promote collaboration across functions and business units, fostering adherence to standards and improving communication with customers, suppliers and partners. The imperative to digitize is one reason the boundaries that traditionally separated hardware and infrastructure, Internet, IT services and telecommunications have blurred.

Digitization programs require strong board-level support to align all stakeholders and overcome inertia and skepticism.

Companies that digitize processes will win new customers, stay away from the competition and improve their bottom lines. To kick-start the process and build digital capabilities and momentum, organizations should undertake one or two pilots and then scale rapidly.

All companies should heed the call to digitize their business end to end—or else risk falling victim to a competitor that better understands this unprecedented opportunity.