Technologies that were once seen as experimental have quickly become the lifeblood of successful companies across the globe.
Mobile, cloud, social media, virtualization and big data – once considered hot technology trends worth exploring – have moved well beyond the stage of experimentation.
[source: Accenture] They are proven tools that have given birth to an age where technology has become the foundation of any successful business – it’s a prime driver of market differentiation, business growth, innovation, adaptability, collaboration and profitability. In short, every business is now a digital business and those where the full C-Suite understand the benefits of this are those that will be most successful.
Farsighted organizations have recognized IT as a key strategic asset with which to review vital aspects of corporate operations. Using digital tools to identify useful data, evaluate it, analyze it, derive insights from it, share it, manage it, comment on it, report on it and — most importantly — act on it, has become essential. Executive leadership teams must be stewards of this new digital mindset. They must recognize that the separation between technology and business has vanished, and that understanding and using technologies is now the key to any long lasting success.
Corporate leaders must rethink digital strategies to move beyond e-commerce and marketing. When used properly, digital tools can help restore that intimacy – that personalized service – between a provider and a customer that, in many cases, has been lost.
Consumers are more than faceless digital transactions or demographic profiles. They’re individuals. Yet many companies have concentrated on using mobile technology, social networks and context-based services to build more detailed demographics rather than to improve ways of interacting with their customers. Digital provides a key new approach to consumer engagement and loyalty. It gives businesses rich channels for communicating with consumers in a much more personal way by providing more convenient access, more effective interactions and an increase in individualized services.
Using digital technology to customize the customer experience over multiple channels is a huge driver of revenue growth. An example is the shoe company Meat Pack. It built a mobile app called “Hijack” which detected when a customer entered a competitors store at which point it offered a promotion. A discount countdown was then displayed – starting at 99% and ticking down by 1% every second until the customer entered the Meat Pack store. Success is based on the fact that the customer experiences a seamless transition between the different technologies and the business is able to collaborate and integrate data across all the different information channels.
And by adding a successful social media strategy to the mix, companies can further strengthen their brand when these happy consumers communicate with each other, swapping stories about their purchases and their experiences. In the digital age, these positive customer reviews are just as essential to brand loyalty as paid advertising.
When it comes to aggregate information, companies are no longer suffering from a lack of data. They are instead suffering from a lack of useable data. With every data gap, enterprises miss an opportunity to make better decisions. Plugging these data gaps requires a fundamental shift in how software applications are built, configured, implemented and updated. Applications must be designed to deliver data that answers more of an enterprise’s specific questions — a forensic net that captures specified data and can provide useful information geared towards specific needs and services.
Specificity with data is not the only key to effective analytics. Speed is also of the essence. If too much time elapses between the acquisition of data and the ability to actually use it to bring about effective actions, then the whole process is useless. In a digitized and mobile business environment, near instantaneous responses has become the norm. A surge of new technologies that help to accelerate the data cycle from insight to action, increasing the enterprise’s ability to deal with data velocity, is expected to help meet this demand.
Newer low-cost analytical packages decrease the time needed for problem driven exploration. Even new big data technologies designed to handle large volumes of unstructured data must be adapted to work in real time, or as close as possible to real time. The point is not to strive for some real-time nirvana. What’s crucial is an improving rate of response, regardless of the rising volumes of data to be accessed and analyzed. It’s not just the size of the data that counts. It’s now about matching velocity of a company’s data to the pace at which that business needs to act on it.
Social media has become an indispensable platform for interaction with customers. It is also a powerful tool for internal interaction – for reimagining how employees interact and collaborate internally. In most cases, enterprise communication within a company is a set of siloed channels: email, videoconferencing and social-activity streams such as Facebook.
Companies need to go beyond what social sites are doing. They need to build social channels that can integrate directly into business processes and the software supporting them. This will create a solution that has specific and measurable productivity gains. And these are not bolt-on solutions that are purchased from vendors to address strategic needs. Enterprises must design these solutions themselves, ensuring that they best match specific needs.
Cloud is no longer an emerging trend and businesses can ill-afford to ignore its transformational potential. It is crucial for organizations to create hybrid capabilities that combine the best elements of cloud, mixing on-premise and off-premise IT and integrating cloud with legacy systems and traditional software. By harnessing cloud skillfully, corporate leaders can enter whole new businesses or launch new products in short order.
As an integral part of their IT strategies, cloud can make businesses more responsive, more flexible, more scalable and more competitive. At this point, the question on every corporate leader’s mind should not be, “Are you going to use cloud technology.” It should be, “How can we embed cloud technology into our corporate landscape in a way that will provide strong differentiation in the marketplace?”
Today’s corporate environment – from social interaction all the way down to its basic business models – is built around digital technology. COOs, CMOs and CEOs who can best exploit these advantages will help position their companies to better compete in the marketplace. Those who don’t will fall behind. And their companies will fall behind with them.