Digital transformation has been changing the business landscape for roughly a decade now, but as Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said recently, because of the coronavirus pandemic “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
When such a rush for adaptation emerges, businesses tend to favour short-term actions. There is no question that pure technology implementation is a must when digitally prepping companies for the future to come; however, success requires to establish beforehand a proper strategy. These strategies must address such matters as value-driven outcomes and ROI estimations, the maturity of organization and availability of resources, and the company’s culture.
That makes very difficult to define THE technology to bet for without proper consideration of the context we are in (type of business, competitive status, challenges/opportunities to target, state of the company, etc.). While my background in business intelligence makes prone to point to Artificial Intelligence as the technology of my choice as an answer to an unspecified brief, I believe positioning myself without a context it is a wrong professional choice as a business strategist.
However, there are some data that can help us paint a picture of potential applications of these technologies and thus support us in understanding which, why, and how to implement them successfully. For instance, a study on the state of DX for industrial companies by PTC, a technology consultancy specialized in digital transformation, looked at 8 technologies and the percentage of implementation in such companies:
Source: The State of Industrial Digital Transformation, PTC.
Mobile and Cloud seem to win the implementation battle and projected to grow more, partly because of 5G deployment in case of mobile technologies, and consistent growth of Cloud implementation across all industries - IoT and AI/ML come closely. Blockchain and Cybersecurity are not part of this specific study, but others are pointing at emerging markets as the biggest implementation drivers for blockchain technologies, while Cybersecurity is expected to soar to an estimated market size of $ 248,3 millions by 2023 according to a report by Markets & Markets.
All of these data illustrate the strategic importance and value of all these technologies, even though that, as mentioned, it is impossible to calculate the impact in a company without getting through an analysis of its specifics.
Strategists know that best practices and case studies are also an important way of estimating potential value when in an early stage of strategic analysis. Listing all of them is a herculean task belonging more to corporate analysis, but in my opinion, these are some of the most promising and inspirational applications nowadays:
The use of blockchain technologies in anticorruption policies within the public sector is a potentially world-changing application.
AI/ML will be crucial in the next step on business intelligence: prescriptive analysis, a much more advanced form of forecasting which allows combining predictions with multiple potential courses of action.
Roll-out of Cloud technologies in Healthcare will ultimately support the development of holistic medicine, while at the same time developing the privacy compliance required for such sensitive data and healthcare legislation.
IoT will be significantly powered in terms of data processing capability and shorter latency times not only by 5G but also by edge computing; one of the top trends to watch in 2020 by Gartner.
Multicloud environments - said to be planned for implementation by 98% of surveyed companies by IBM - will drive supporting technologies such as identity management to ensure centralized control and safety of data.
What do you think about these case studies? Do you think there are other interesting technologies/applications that will become predominant in the early future?