What Is Digital Transformation?
Key Points:
- While digital transformation is not new, it has recently gained attention.
- Digital transformation is using your existing IT technology to improve your ability to make your organization’s best decisions by ensuring timely and accurate data that produces action.
- Digital transformation enables your organization to grow and turns your IT investment into a profit center.
Thanks to Rick Koski with BACS Consulting Group, Rob Giannini from GiaSpace, and Stuart Crawford with Out N’ Aboot Marketing Ltd. for developing the expert panel on digital transformation.
What is Digital Transformation
While digital transformation has been gaining momentum recently, it’s nothing new. People have been using digital transformation for a very long time. The concept behind digital transformation is taking the data out of your system and other available sources and using it to make the best decisions possible about your business.
Typically CEOs, CFOs, and managers want to be able to make real-time decisions based on the most accurate information available. Most will agree that making the best decisions requires timely data, accurate data, and data that produces action. If you can get those things, you can make good, well-informed decisions, and you can make them quicker.
The concept of digital transformation goes back at least to the mid to late 1990s. In the late 90s, Intel prided itself on being a data-driven company. They collected data on everything, and every decision had to be data-backed. So while it may not have thought of it as that, you could argue that in the late 90s, Intel was using data transformation.
Today Intel has little competition. The fact that they were one of the first to embrace the concept of digital transformation may be one reason for their lack of competition today.
Why Is Digital Transformation Gaining Attention?
We are hearing more about digital transformation today because of some significant things in our world over the past couple of years.
First, the tools used to analyze and automate data flow and perform all these crucial processes have become more widely available and less expensive. While most organizations are used to requiring someone with a computer science degree and typically a background in business analytics to do this kind of work, today, that’s not always necessary.
Now it can be done on a desktop using some commonly available tools, such as Microsoft and Salesforce’s suite of tools called Tableau. Microsoft also offers power apps like Power Bi and Power Automate. In addition, some advanced analytic capabilities have recently been introduced into Microsoft Excel. In most cases, businesses are already paying for the Microsoft power apps and Excel features and don’t even know they’re there.
In addition, there has been a lot of news concerning AI, which is coming on in a big way right now. Apps using AI technology, such as the recently introduced Chat GPT app, are new and fun to play with. However, AI will rapidly become a mainstream business tool as they improve.
Using these tools together is becoming an intuitive and straightforward process. For instance, if you’re working in the Microsoft 365 portal and want to create some automation or analytic tools, you’ll see an icon offering to perform the task using AI. Microsoft has an AI-driven wizard that will then ask you to enter the appropriate data, and it will come up with a solution for you. Machine learning and AI are becoming more mainstream and inexpensive, which is the key for small to medium-sized businesses.
What Does Digital Transformation Mean for You and Your Organization?
In the past, the problem with aggregate data was insufficient or bad data input, leading to bad data. As a result, IT departments would have to scrub the data and do a lot of work before it became useful.
With machine learning, it’s possible to gather the data and scrub for bad data. We can also put in variables to ensure quality data where whatever data you have was digested in the past.
Digital transformation goes beyond technology and includes other dynamics, including workflow processes and people. While AI is not 100% there yet to replace a human being, and you still need a human person to ensure that the solution makes sense, it will revolutionize how people search for information.
As an organization grows, digital transformation becomes even more vital. Digital transformation makes it possible to take your organization to the next level.
A lot of emerging technology with machine learning is being brought into big solution software and taking away the redundant work in nearly every industry. These advances enable systems to do much more sourcing and tracking of shipments, all that lower-end tier stuff that can now be automated.
Digital transformation combines all the technology you are already using to help make the right decisions and find the right solutions. Digital technology turns your IT investment into a profit center.
BACS Consulting Group: Your Digital Transformation Experts
Digitalization is using digital technologies to change business processes and projects—such as skilled employees using new software to enable them to launch products faster. Digital transformation includes digitalization efforts but goes beyond the project level and affects the entire organization.
For most organizations, digital transformation requires a shift from traditional thinking toward a more collaborative and experimental approach. Digital transformation reveals new solutions which can improve your customer’s experience, drive employee innovation and retention, and spur the growth of your organization. While there are many paths to digital transformation and every organization’s journey will be unique, starting a digital transformation requires a change in mindset.
At BACS Consulting Group, we have been practicing digital transformation since our beginning. We believe digital transformation provides an opportunity to reimagine how your organization does things, often from the ground up. Our team of IT experts is the leading IT and digital transformation strategy provider for corporations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Contact us today to learn more about digital transformation and how our team can help take your business to the next level.
Thanks to our colleagues at Clear Concepts for their support.
