Business Transformation: Future-proofing Business Resiliency
- By Paul Mah
- February 13, 2023
The past three years saw a concerted push by businesses to digitalize and transform under the onerous restrictions of the pandemic. Driven by necessity, many embraced digital solutions and lit the fire under previously sluggish digital transformation efforts, achieving years of progress in months of frenetic effort.
As a result, organizations have become more flexible, resilient, and better positioned for the post-pandemic era. Yet past success is no guarantee of future results. To reach new heights, businesses must press ahead by leveraging technology and an innovative mindset amid continued disruptions and an increasingly turbulent world.
Staying relevant in a fluid marketplace
According to Colin Tan, general manager and technology leader at IBM Singapore, the transformation journey plays a key role in the forging of a mature, adaptable organization that maintains its relevance.
“The key to a more successful digital transformation is to not skip ahead. Know what to focus on and invest in resources to get it right. Growing your organization’s digital maturity through the digital transformation process will increase your chances of success,” he said.
Crucially, technology should be viewed as integral to the business roadmap, says Tan, and not seen merely as an enabler of the transformation strategy. And being able to fully implement digital strategy at their core calls for fundamental shifts in leadership mindset, the technology infrastructure, and operational processes.
What does it mean to have an innovative mindset?
“Every business out there, large, and small, must become a forward thinker. Organizations must forecast and anticipate changes before a shift occurs. They must be prepared to tackle a series of forward-planning scenarios and unforeseen changes to mitigate the potential risk arising from the impact of economic circumstances. They must also be able to respond rapidly, even to changes they didn’t anticipate,” said Tan.
“Not all innovation is equal in value or impact. Truly innovative companies have learned that it’s not the size of the budget, the team, or the ‘change’ that creates value. They understand that real competitive value is created when they focus their innovation on those things that only they can offer their customers.”
Catalysts for innovation
Business plans don’t exist in a vacuum but are influenced and hastened by industry trends and developments in technology. When it comes to technology, Tan expects a pervasive and organization-wide move towards automation as organizations invest heavily in AI and automation technologies this year.
“Some AI and automation projects have not delivered up to expectations because these technologies have been predominantly applied in silos,” he explained. “Organizations will need to move from RPA and rule-based automation, which is normally applied to specific processes, to embedding intelligence across different processes and task levels.”
In addition, expect a greater move toward no-code (NC) or low-code (LC) software, which is hastened by advancements in AI. Using IBM Automation platforms as an example, Tan highlighted how it can now seamlessly process and manage human-error-prone tasks such as data mappings due to its embedded AI capabilities.
“The growing need for businesses to respond with agility and speed to changing market dynamics has also led to increased adoption of LC/NC approach. It reduces project timelines from months to days, leading to faster product rollouts,” he said.
Tan ticked off other technology trends, such as the operationalization of ML, growing hybrid multi-cloud deployments, the impact of quantum computers on cybersecurity, and the evolving nature of the workforce.
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Sustainability as a business mandate
Technology has an important role to play in sustainability, too. Specifically, technology can play a role in improving supply chains. For example, AI and automation can give organizations the ability to produce whatever they’re selling while consuming fewer inputs, notes Tan.
“This impacts the supply chain and energy consumption. As fewer inputs are needed for a unit of output, less energy is used, and fewer greenhouse gases are emitted.”
Of course, organizations must first establish a baseline for their current carbon footprint before they can track and measure their future sustainability performance.
“Companies that don’t have a sound data foundation, good data architecture, data fabric and aren’t able to integrate all the data from the enterprise into an application or a capability that will produce an ESG scorecard will be at a disadvantage. The key issue is data and digital transformation.”
The pressure to do more for sustainability is growing: Referring to an IBM study, Tan noted that roughly half of the CEOs polled say they feel direct pressure from ecosystem partners, board members, and investors to improve sustainability outcomes – but only 40% have identified initiatives to close their sustainability gaps for change.
A doorway to new possibilities
Ultimately, technology on its own isn’t enough, though it can be a great enabler. Tan highlights the hybrid, multi-cloud as an example of an enabler that can give businesses flexibility, resilience, and – when implemented properly – deep integration into an enterprise’s data sources.
“Businesses must assemble layers of flexibility, agility, and collaboration to evaluate complex problems, curate options, determine the alternatives with the highest success rate and survive any market dynamic by intensifying business resilience and executing with start-up speed,” said Tan.
Success calls for an innovation culture to be embedded from the outset, says Tan, and the creation of multi-disciplinary execution teams to build the digital solutions needed to fulfill the needs of both internal and external customers.
“Enterprise siloes need to be dismantled to allow new flows of thinking to emerge and measurable results to be achieved. Innovation must address business priorities; it needs to be driven by user empathy, business cases, evidence-based analyses, and excellent data sources.”
“If you shift your mindset to that of a modern business, assessing everything through a lens of value - value to your shareholders, your employees, your partners and of course, your customers, you begin to see those challenges as symptoms indicating a different approach is required.”
Finally, businesses must choose their battles well. Tan summed up: “Focus your innovation on moments that matter. Today’s business climate is too competitive to spend scarce budget customizing technology to fit old processes.”
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/NanoStockk
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.