This has put digital transformation firmly on the agenda of every c-suite executive and technology leader. This post describes an emerging category of digital business platforms that are helping organizations to accelerate digital change.
The truth is that most businesses struggle to execute transformation. In fact, as many as 70% of digital transformation projects are expected to fail. So in order to help our customers to be among the successful few, we conducted and published a global research study. The results clearly identified that underlying complexity and a lack of agility are biggest barriers to progress.
You know that digital transformation is not just a technology problem. In fact, it’s clarity of vision, and changing the culture of an organization that are most often cited as the toughest challenges. The technology issue arises as businesses quickly discover the rigid limitations of its existing business technologies. Your challenge is to solve both the limitations of your culture, and the limitations of your technology all at once.
Experts all place innovative platform technologies at the heart of any transformation. Platforms have the power to bring people together, particularly IT and the leaders of business units. How? Well, such a platform will offer a work space for collaboration, a common language for communication, and encourage the adoption of agile innovation.
It’s all about making it easier for people to create digital solutions faster, whilst also making sure that those solutions can speak to each other and re-use elements of innovation. Making innovation rapidly repeatable is a huge part of real, enterprise-wide transformation.
“BUILDING A WIDE VARIETY OF INCOMPATIBLE PROCESSES AND SYSTEMS MAY SEEM LIKE PROGRESS, BUT IT LIMITS BIGGER OPPORTUNITIES. THIS INCOMPATIBILITY IMPEDES A COORDINATED APPROACH TO CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND A UNIFIED VIEW OF OPERATIONS.”
– LEADING DIGITAL, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
Here’s a simple vision of where they fit in. A central platform can connect and create a layer of agility on top of your systems of record – whilst also driving the digital experiences that display that information to customers, employees and partners.
One of the fundamental benefits of a digital business platform is that it can help you to get more value from your existing technology by making more of the goodness within. Most businesses are sitting on a wealth of data, but many are yet to discover the valuable insights from that the data that could inform innovation and create competitive advantage.
“THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF DATA IS WELL UNDERWAY. THE DATA AND ANALYTICS PLATFORM MUST INCLUDE SELF-SERVICE FOR INCREASINGLY WIDER CONSTITUENCIES IN YOUR ORGANIZATION.”
– GARTNER
Almost all of the organizations we work with are working extremely hard to improve the customer experience in order to meet ever-increasing customer expectations. One of the essential parts of that process is empowering customer service staff, wherever they are – with the customer context they need to offer a more personalized service.
Serving important contextual information about a customer to a member of staff at exactly the right moment is just one example of how digital business platforms can have a huge impact on your business.
