Businesses have had to always adapt to new hardware, software and processes, but perhaps never as quickly as they do now in the digital age.
Digital transformation is about more than just switching from analog to digital It’s about completely changing your business processes to get the most of your digital technologies to increase productivity and your customers’ experience.
Leveraging Data Analytics
One key to digital transformation is managing the sheer amount of data that is available. But it’s not just about having equipment that can handle the increased capacity —it’s having access to vast amounts of data that can help businesses make smarter decisions through analytics.
Cloud analytics is particularly useful for data consolidation. More specifically, it can pull together all sources of data in order to best perform advanced analytics to examine customer behaviors and demographics, as well as improve internal processes.
Improved Internal and External Collaboration
Aside from learning how to better market to potential customers and make their experiences more personal, data analytics can improve how your team communicates.
For example, employees can share internal notes and documents to facilitate collaboration while working remotely, which is an increasing trend, especially in this Covid 19 era of the new normal.
One major component of digital transformation is how you followup with your customers and resolve issues. For example, cloud-based chatbots are becoming a popular way of interacting with customers using artificial intelligence capabilities.
A chatbot isn’t just making the service process faster: it’s a different approach from using phone representatives
Digital Transformation is Within Reach.
For smaller businesses, building a sophisticated data center may be too expensive and complicated to manage. However, while many enterprises choose a data center as part of their digital transformation strategy, cloud-based services allow smaller businesses to cost-effectively scale its services as needed.
Many businesses have aging IT infrastructure that will not quickly handle upgrades or large amounts of data. In fact, older equipment that uses a lot of power and requires a lot of maintenance can eat into an IT budget that could be put to better use. However, in-house data centers also require IT professionals that know the equipment, as opposed to cloud-based applications where much of the technical burden is put on the provider, which saves costs. Today, businesses can cost effectively utilize data center services from various vendors without having their own facility
Deciding whether a data center or cloud (or both) is right for your operation depends on your budget and what you’re trying to achieve. However, having one or both can greatly enhance your digital transformation strategy.