Enterprise digital transformation

Digital transformation is the application of digital technologies to fundamentally impact all aspects of business and society.

- infoworld.com

Digital transformation (DX) is an industry buzzword and a very strong initiative that every enterprise is taking without much deliberation. As the word suggests, it refers to transforming enterprises with information technology as one of its core pillars. Investing in technologies would definitely happen as part of this initiative, but data is one of the key aspects in achieving the so-called transformation.

Enterprises has known the importance of data and its analysis more and more in recent times, and that has definitely made every enterprise think out-of-the-box; this initiative is a way to establish data at the center.

As part of this business transformation, enterprises should definitely have Data lake as one of the core investments, with every department agreeing to share their data to flow into this Data lake, without much prejudice or pride.

Enterprises embarking on this journey

A Forrester Consulting research study commissioned by Accenture Interactive found that the key drivers of digital transformation are profitability, customer satisfaction, and increased speed-to-market.

Many enterprises are, in fact, already on the path of digital transformation. It is no more a buzzword, and enterprises are indeed making every effort to transform themselves using technology as one of the drivers and, you guessed it right, the other one being data.

Enterprises taking this path have clearly defined objectives. Obviously, this changes according to the enterprise and the business they are in. But some of the common ones, in no particular order, are as follows:

• Radically improve customer experience
• Reduce cost
• Increase in revenue
• Bring in differentiation from competitors
• Tweak business processes and, in turn, change the business model

Some examples

There are a number of clear examples about what enterprises want to achieve in this space, some of which are as follows:

• Ability to segment customers and give them personalized products. Targeting campaigns to the right person at the right time.
• Bringing in more technologies and reducing manual work, basically digitizing many aspects in the enterprise.
• Using social information clubbed together with enterprise data to make some important decisions.
• Predicting the future in a more quantitative fashion and taking necessary steps and also preparing accordingly, well in advance, obviously.
• Taking business global using technology as an important vehicle.

The next section details one of the use cases that enterprises want to achieve as part of digital transformation, with data as the main contributor. Understanding the use case is important as this is the use case we will try to implement in this book throughout.