Staying Competitive in 2020
Listen to RiverEast Digital co-founders discuss how companies can stay competitive while improving their abilities to learn, respond, and adapt quickly to changes in today’s environment.
Covid-19 Forcing Digital Transformation
May 8, 2020
The global pandemic has triggered digital transformation to become a top priority for many companies. Tele-community has become the new normal; many industries that formerly prohibited remote work have been forced to reverse that policy for their employees. While approximately 70% of companies had implemented, or were in process of implementing some form of digital transformation that enables their employees to remain productive, many are currently struggling with supporting a stay-at-home workforce.
Work life has changed for most of us, from bankers to aerospace engineers to teachers. More than ever before, we are communicating with friends and family via video calls, to stay connected.
With travel limited and large gatherings prohibited, many companies have shifted their strategy to creating digital events and digital content. Every day I see people posting photos of their large online meetings with coworkers and stories from teams learning to enjoy this new way of working. It remains unseen whether these businesses will continue to follow this digital, tele-community approach, revert to the face-to-face meeting and office work style, or implement a hybrid methodology.
However, there are real challenges to overcome for companies that are struggling currently with basic functions, such as sharing and co-editing documents securely or accessing and acting on data analytics. Real-time information may not be available, streaming may present issues, and smart phones may not be so smart. Even short physical distances are a challenge for collaboration between coworkers.
Without the cloud during the Coronavirus pandemic, companies would struggle to share and co-edit documents securely, access analytics and much more. Even short physical distances would present a challenge for collaboration between coworkers without the cloud; real-time data would not be as easy to access, streaming would be a problem, and smart phones would not be smart – to name a few.
The goal of a digital transformation is to use technology to solve traditional problems, which means integrating technology into every area of the business. When done right, digital transformation allows companies to provide unprecedented value to customers. Digital transformation is an ongoing process, which means continually working through above steps in the diagram.
Change and venturing into the unknown can be difficult, but the benefits that come from creating a forward-thinking, customer-focused, digital company can be lasting. Perhaps this is the silver lining for businesses in the age of COVID-19; forced change can be positive for employees, partners, and customers.
River East provides full end-to-end consulting for your digital transformation, resulting in a full blueprint and execution strategy. Contact us to learn more.
Focus on Data in Digital Transformation
April 18,2020
“Digital Transformation” is a popular catch phrase in many technology articles lately. But why is it so important? What makes a digital transformation imperative in today’s environment is preparing organizations to support their vision of the future, transform business outcomes in an agile and efficient way, and respond quickly to new digital disruptions.
One key component of the digital transformation imperative is data. Data is increasing at an unprecedented pace. Approximately 175 Zettabytes (one ZB is equal to a billion Terabytes) will be created by the year 2025, according to a recent IDC study, compared to 41ZB of data generated in 2019. Technologies such as The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and 5G have been catalysts for the growth of not only data, but also the growth of opportunities to derive new data-driven business value.
The starting point in using this plethora of data is creating a strategy for determining how the business model relates to its data. How can business outcomes be improved? What are the insights that that support better decisions? What business problems must be solved?
For companies that want to take advantage of artificial intelligence, data is the foundation of AI algorithms which unlock the hidden information and knowledge. The accuracy and usefulness of AI algorithms continues to improve as the amount of data increases. Search engines, such as Google and Microsoft, have generated an extraordinarily abundant set of image and text data which they have used to train AI models.
Inherent with the data strategy are several challenges. Often, organizations are not clear on what data it is storing currently and what, of that data, is actually valuable. In addition to data analysis, decisions must be made regarding cleaning, formatting, translating, storing, and security, each of which adds to the value in supporting the organization’s desired end results.
Ultimately, a comprehensive focus on data as the foundation of its digital transformation enables organizations to take advantage of new business opportunities and deliver faster and more informed decisions, improved customer service, and increased productivity.