Hybrid Approach Needed To Drive True Digital Transformation
Even a cursory glance through recent tech trends reveals that what constituted digital transformation just five years ago, is some way off today’s definition, reflecting the sheer scope and rapid acceleration of technological innovation.
One commonality, however, is the motivation behind it. All incarnations have ultimately been rooted in the delivery of an enhanced customer experience, driven by an increasingly informed and empowered consumer.
Fuelled by greater access to more online information, multiple channels, and increased choice – all of which have grown exponentially since the early 90s – the rising expectation for seamless and anywhere anytime service has become the ultimate challenge for businesses to address.
We see the first significant and collective response to this traction back in 2008, which up to 2014 represents the first phase of the digital transformation journey. As the global financial crisis took hold, this was the year when businesses both large and small made the customer experience a priority, a significant hike in awareness and focus from just a year earlier.
Consequently, user interfaces played a greater role in a competitive business strategy, transcending conventional methods of customer engagement through the rising number of entry points, be it mobile or tablet. With this enhanced mobility came limitless opportunities to not only reach more customers, but to also better understand them – a visibility that was previously unthinkable.
In 2010, the first seeds of the app revolution were sown, thanks to the rise of the smartphone, which helped to mobilize the workforce and rethink the end user experience across many daily interactions. It was, however, to take another three years before the level of this disruption gained momentum as an accelerant of digital transformation. Only by 2014 can we see the evolution of an app strategy from one that simply replicates web applications on mobile devices to one that transforms the customer experience and a business’s internal culture.
More broadly, however, efforts were still tempered by a lack of clear strategy and failure to employ the truly joined up approach needed for meaningful digital change. Fundamental issues with integration architecture still needed to be addressed. CIOs, cautious of implementing major change in a still precarious economic climate, were loyal to legacy applications, despite the compatibility issues which resulted in cumbersome IT infrastructures unable to compete with more nimble alternatives.
Throwing point to point integration models at the problem was all too often the kind of sticking plaster that came unstuck, particularly when attempting to integrate complex infrastructures. Here, the margin for error grew in tandem with the addition of more and more components.
As we entered the next phase of this evolution, signalling digital transformation 2.0, we saw a greater injection of speed and agility in the enterprise.
Central to this was rapid application development, enabling solutions to be created for common business problems around real-time analytics, big data and IoT – all without the need to write a line of code.
