How Not to Get Left Behind in the Global Digital Transformation
Published by GeneXusUSA.com
Probably the number 1 question most of the CIOs have is about how to thrive in the digital world, how to deliver new business needs in a faster, more agile way.
The digital transformation brings tons of new opportunities, however, only those organizations who really embrace and understand how far and fast they need to transform will survive. And to talk about the “digital transformation” we need to talk about technologies which will enable businesses to flourish in this world dominated by social media, mobile devices, and connectivity exploring all information that can be collected, processed and shared.
This digital transformation — by the way, mandatory to companies surviving versus their competitors — requires businesses to integrate with high volumes of data to predict, influence and respond to customer behavior. If your competitor is already doing this you probably are losing business and are behind the curve to survive in this landscape.
Some interesting facts provided by a survey conducted by KPMG (KPMG’s US CEO Outlook 2017) shows that 72% of business leaders are acting now rather than waiting to be disrupted by competitors. On the other hand, many are conscious they are not utilizing digital to its full potential. What concerning about this survey is that over 45% of the people who took the survey are not leveraging digital to connect to their customers effectively. If they don’t reverse course immediately, they will suffer major disruptions and be forced to downsize or get out of their business for lack of understanding the new challenges in the digital world. Even worse, if they enter the digital transformation revolution with trepidation, and only doing the bare minum required to maintain what they have now, without developing systems and processes for the future, they will fall by the wayside.
Companies should view the digital transformation as a natural evolution from traditional business, which is much more suitable to the modern world of gadgets, connectivity, social medias, etc.
And every time there is a natural progression of business models, there are more opportunities for innovation, scalability, and agility aiming to change processes and to reach new prospects and markets.
Most businesses can now leverage digital innovations such as mobility, digital labor, internet of things, and data and analytics. However, a large portion of these businesses can’t take advantage of the benefits that these innovations can bring.
An example, several factories have updated their machinery using the latest and greatest in terms of technology — full of sensors collecting data, connectivity, LED panels, etc. However, just few of these factories can extract all the benefits these technologies can provide — large amounts of data to analyze, modeling and predicting. So, companies are leaving business opportunities and revenue on the table because they are not really embracing the digital world. IoT and Big Data are key elements of the new digital world. It’s not just about acquiring sophisticate machines. Companies need to adjust processes and develop tools to take advantage of these benefits.
In other words, to drive true digital transformation, there is a need for optimizing every asset and process throughout every aspect of business operations, including faster development of tools to comply with the requirements from customers and competitors.
And the competitive advantage comes not just from identifying the innovations and implementing them in isolation, but from using them in new combinations to address industry-specific challenges and drive transformation.
One critical word associate with digital transformation is AUTOMATION — this is a simple word to consider that if you can automate a process — any process — you can optimize resources and expedite results.
We know that digital transformation impacts all areas of any given business. However, IT is the one suffering the most. Several requests from all areas, vast amounts of data to analyze, the development of tools for CRM, ERP, Customer Services, etc — he requirements are always — need faster, bolder and cheaper! The best way to improve and complete this picture comes back to “automation”.
And thinking about the best tool that could offer automation to simplify the development of tools for the IT, I have to mention GeneXus.
The Genexus platform was created to enable any developer (with large or minimum experience) to create cross-platform apps offering outstanding user experience, faster than any other tool in the market.
Genexus methodology is agile and accelerates the automation of process such as development, maintenance, integration and modernization of business applications and software systems. GeneXus enables users to quickly adopt modern technologies — the core of the digital transformation.
GeneXus facilitates the path to digital transformation, with more options for the data management, dynamic transactions, more collaboration features, and cloud computing providers to choose the most appropriate services companies looking for the digital world. And for the mobile environment, GeneXus Mobile Application Generator is the smartest solution to digitally transform any company’s business. This Mobile Application Generator allows businesses to create enterprise and end user applications for any Android, iOS (iPad and iPhone) and Windows device in an agile and secure way.
GeneXus is a multi-environment software development platform used by more than 8,500 companies for creating data-based enterprise software that runs on servers, desktop computers and on the Web, as well as on mobile devices.
If you’re ready to embrace the digital world with GeneXus for faster results and savings, reach out to me at ajulio@genexus.com for a demonstration and free trial. And learn more about GeneXus as: http://genexususa.com.
