The Competitive Advantage of Digital Transformation

To remain competitive in today’s business world and continue to grow and evolve at the same time, companies must digitally transform in both new and incremental ways. Accepting this reality and engaging in digital transformation enables them to outperform the ever-advancing status quo and maintain pace with, or even outrun, the market leaders.

Part of this process includes the adoption of cloud-based business apps. Companies have quickly moved from viewing the use of such apps as just another technology deployment to a much more strategic business move to drive success. In fact, a recent survey and report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found that nearly 60 percent of the participating 427 organizations credit their use of cloud-based apps to the transformation of how they operate across the entire enterprise.

Leading companies understand that a complete digital transformation is essential in staying ahead of the competition. Digitization must go beyond that of onsite software and siloed information storage to business apps that encompass cloud, social, big data, and artificial intelligence. Leaders in this more advanced stage of digital transformation are leveraging these business apps to build a 360-degree view of their customers while also shaping their overall strategy.

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) report found that those organizations — from midsize companies to large worldwide enterprises — who reported using cloud-based business apps attributed extended efficiency, increased innovation, and access to new insights to the use of such apps. These companies are removing manual processes, adding automation and improving workflows through the use of apps to achieve a laundry list of business-boosting activity, including:

• Increased sales performance
• Increased employee productivity
• Reduced costs and improved operational efficiency
• An enhanced customer experience
• Market differentiation

Business leaders are quickly realizing the correlation of a complete digital transformation to business success, which often starts with the use of cloud-based apps like those available in the AppExchange. In any given industry, digital transformation through the adoption of cloud-based apps is the key factor that enables a few companies to grow and thrive at the expense of the lagging companies. Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group, was quoted in the HBR report on the true importance of this process.

“This revolution is not simply one of cutting costs or speeding up existing processes,” he says. “At its best, this is about changing the game from reactive to proactive, from transaction to true process.”

As cloud-based business apps emerge as a foundational element of successful digital transformation strategies at many companies, their adoption is rapidly shifting from a business “nice to have” to a “must have.” And even in light of this, the survey results show many companies are still dragging their feet. While all respondents were interested in using business apps, more than half reported to only be in the early stages of implementation. In order to truly maximize their potential, companies must push for full, organization-wide adoption of business apps.

Read the full report here.