The rise of platforms as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) has elevated IT from a supporting role to the primary driver of commercial and enterprise growth. IT isn’t merely part of the business; increasingly, it is the business. The success of IT teams, however, will increasingly be measured by how well they bring digital transformation to the forefront of their organizations and make true change a reality. While 9 out of 10 CEOs say they want to drive digital transformation, fewer than half are actually prepared for it. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored that digital change is more than “nice to have.” It has been the single biggest differentiator between businesses that have thrived and those that have been left behind. Cloud-based, AI-fueled service platforms are what make it possible for IT to unify their processes and drive profitable change throughout their companies. Soon, every competitive company will be in the digital space, with smart IT deployed across a sophisticated service platform.
1. Make Change Possible Through the Cloud
Cloud-based enterprise solutions are a necessary ingredient for digital transformation. By bringing IT into the cloud, organizations can reap the benefits of connected data, shared experiences, and, most importantly, adaptability. With legacy systems, even small changes often require significant and time-consuming changes. Contrast this to cloud-based solutions, where firms can add, remove, customize, and update anything—at any time, and quickly. You’re also able to access the cloud anywhere, regardless of where you are in the world.
2. Deploy AI Across Departments
Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the latest and most transformational piece in the digital revolution. The reason: It paves the way for innovation by automating routine tasks and giving back time to a live agent so they can focus on more meaningful and impactful work. Once the province of sci-fi movies, AI has moved mainstream and is being deployed across top companies to optimize everything from customer service to financial reporting. The benefits go beyond the direct return on investment; putting human talent to work
on higher-value tasks encourages more innovation and improves the employee experience.
3. Break Down Silos
Behind the biggest gains in digital transformation is the ability to see, manage, and collaborate across departments and teams. Almost without exception, potentially insightful and useful company data gets stranded, or siloed, in the originating department or system. The architecture of sophisticated enterprise platforms breaks down data silos and allows IT to proactively identify problems, inconsistencies, and conflicts among different departments, and then move quickly to resolve the issue.
4. Enhance Customer Experience with Predictive Technology
A big step forward for consumer (employee) experience is the marriage of SaaS and customer service. More than 80% of customer interactions are currently done without a human on the customer support side, according to a recent study for Invoca Research. Like many other areas of business, technology has made operations more efficient and scalable, reducing customer service processing times and allowing people to focus on the crucial inflection points for human interaction. For customer service, SaaS apps can reduce time-killing workloads of common issues to instant automated replies, keep labor costs down, and allow your customer support team to focus on adding value by addressing the problems of outliers whose endorsement would reflect well on the company.
5. Democratize App Development
Within four years, nearly three-quarters of large enterprises are expected to be using at least four low-code development tools for IT application development and citizen development initiatives. What low-code and no-code in-house app development does for an enterprise can be a game changer. New unified platforms allow those closest to processes but with no programming skills to easily create new solutions in-house without using programming code. The benefits are many: Apps get to market faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional app builds.
6. Measure Projects with Velocity-to-Value
Rather than focusing on the sheer number of projects, their value to the enterprise is a smarter measure: velocity-to-value is a better way to track real progress. Under this metric, projects are ranked by the sum of values of their complexity and the number of months of effort it took to develop to earn its velocity value. That number is weighed against the velocity of the past year’s portfolio to give it a velocity-to-value ranking. This new measure helps divine which apps have the best return on investment (ROI) and becomes a guide for more valuable development in the pipeline.
7. Look at Productivity From Many Different Angles
One of the chief benefits reaped by companies that have made a digital transformation is the accompanying boost in productivity. Productivity gains come from AI, transparency, ease of app building, and other areas. A report on the total business value of ServiceNow IT apps10 identified five major ways technology supports productivity gains. Still, organizations should look at productivity from many different angles, including the indirect benefits. Digital transformation often goes hand in hand with better employee satisfaction and experience, collaboration, and work/life balance—key factors in productivity.
8. Automate Workflow for Better Employee Experience
The launch of sophisticated enterprise platforms focuses on automating complex workflows that once required long manual processes, time-sucking approvals, and menial labor. The new black is being able to build custom automated workflows that greatly improve productivity—and the overall employee experience. Customer service and human resources are two departments that stand to benefit the most from automated workflows.
9. Create Profitable Synergies by Ditching Legacy Systems
Benefits begin when companies let go. The use of different business practices, inefficient workflows, customer and employee service disparities, and legacy software had long been a challenge at mid-size and large companies. Reconciling these differences spanned inefficient meetings and required the legal and IT departments at a minimum. The launch of sophisticated enterprise platforms focuses on automating complex workflows that once required long manual processes, time-sucking approvals, and menial labor. The new black is being able to build custom automated workflows that greatly improve productivity—and the overall employee experience. Customer service and human resources are two departments that stand to benefit the most from automated workflows. Embracing the benefits of a unified cloud-based platform, however, brings processes together, automates many, creates unparalleled oversight, and provides a launchpad for easy app development in a new world, free of legacy systems, where these synergies transform companies into more profitable versions of themselves.
Now more than ever, the success or failure of most organizations hinges on making digital transformation a reality. This shift has turned the relationship between business and IT on its head: IT doesn’t merely support commercial and enterprise growth—it drives it. In fact, the most significant IT trends are those that drive digital transformation or are accelerating because of it. The common denominator—across all industries—is the cloud and the central role it plays in connecting data, experiences, and teams while allowing for maximum flexibility to be ready for whatever comes next. Protect your organization and prosper, even during times of disruption, by building a smarter workflow process with the help of JIT.