Helping enterprise with IT enables solutions

Digital Transformation is just the beginning. To evolve your business to the changing world, achieving Digital Maturity is essential. Get Insights here.

After a leap from legacy business to a digitally transformed business, it is imperative to evolve as a digitally mature organization to compete with the nimbler competitors. While digital transformation enables you to rethink your existing business operations, digital maturity enables you to evolve and thrive amidst the changing digital landscape.

Let me ask you simple questions, to help you retrospect your business.

Is your business doing digital or being digital?

In an era where the “Digital First” approach is table stakes for survival, being “Digital Savvy” is imperative to thrive. It is no longer just about using digital products; it is about being digital to the core.

Is your business continuously evolving?

If your business embraces innovation (with ethical guardrails), cultivates strong culture, matches the pace of market, and provides an ecosystem to explore and learn, your business is certainly evolving.

Having answered these questions, you will now be able to evaluate your business in terms of maturity. But before evaluation, lets delve deeper into the concept of digital maturity.

What is Digital Maturity?

Digital Maturity compels you to look beyond technology, towards cultivating culture and shaping the digital future. The digital maturity concept pillars on two distinct but related things — digital intensity and transformation management intensity. While digital intensity refers to the level of investments towards technology-enabled initiatives, transformation management intensity signifies the investments to create digital transformation within a business. While the former emphasizes on evolving the business operations, the latter accentuates on the vision to shape a new future through governance and engagement.

The Four Levels of Digital Maturity

Based on the above concepts, you can now begin evaluating and analyzing where your business currently stands in the digital maturity race.

There are typically four levels of digitally maturing businesses:

Level 1: Digital Beginners – These businesses have very narrow advanced digital capabilities, although they might be matured with traditional applications. They are unaware of the opportunities and make small investments without actual transformation management.

Level 2: Digital fashionistas – They experiment with many appealing digital applications, some of which may create value, but most do not. Their overall business efforts guise motivation, but lack in vision, strategy, and real knowledge.

Level 3: Digital Conservatives – They favor wisdom over innovation. They understand the need for a strong uniting vision, governance, and business culture to ensure investments are managed well. But, spending wisely through careful approach and avoiding risks, makes them lose some valuable opportunities.

Level 4: Digirati – These businesses accurately understand how to drive value with digital transformation by transformative vision, careful governance, engagement, investment in new opportunities by taking calculative risks and implementing continuous advancements.

Which level does your business fall in?

8 Steps to achieve Digital Maturity

No matter which level your business currently falls in, you can always take your business to the next level. Below is a step-by-step guide to help your business achieve Digital Maturity.

Step 1: Make digital core to your business

Implementing digital talent skills in the entire organization with a customer-first mindset, collaboration, and design thinking is the first step towards Digital maturity. Start looking your business through a digital lens to find where digital technology and skills can be embraced.

Not technology, but talent and culture are key drivers of digital success.

Step 2: Develop strategy at an initial stage

Strategy is the strongest trait of a digitally matured business. Developing a clear and coherent digital strategy at an early stage of digital transformation is essential to achieve digital maturity later. Start preparing your business to consistently adapt to the ongoing digital change.

Step 3: Plan with time horizons of five years or more

Creating an effective approach while considering your overall business objectives and the time horizons beyond 5 years is yet another crucial step towards digital maturity. To play the long game, start looking at your business strategies and goals with a broad time horizon.

Step 4: Adopt digital innovation, more than just experimentation

What often sets digitally matured businesses apart is their ability to upgrade digital experiments. Start considering the evolving technologies and market trends as an opportunity to reimagine your business operations and bring more value to your business.

Step 5: Implement cross-functional collaboration

Breaking down functional silos and focusing on cross-functional collaboration is the key to digital maturity success. Start implementing cross-functional teams to empower new mindsets and working styles, therefore reinforcing innovation, company culture and agility.

It’s just more difficult to think about any function in isolation because the processes are becoming so integrated. The opportunity for integration and collaboration is so great that it drives greater effectiveness and efficiency. - David Cotteleer at Harley-Davidson.

Step 6: Cultivate a collaborative and risk-tolerant digital culture

Overcoming aversion to risk is perhaps the most important characteristic of digitally maturing culture. Start cultivating a strong culture that encourages risk taking, teamwork, agility, and continuous learning.

Step 7: Create an environment that enables digital maturity

Start investing to create an environment for employees which is far beyond training, where employees can continuously learn, gain digital experiences, and grow.

Step 8: Implement commitment and leadership

Digital maturity does not develop accidentally, it is achieved through commitment, investment, and management. Start determining realistic priorities through commitment and leadership to expedite digital maturity.

75% of businesses who commit sufficient time, energy, and resources to digital endeavors say these efforts are successful.  

The Financial Advantage

Let us understand the economic advantages of achieving digital maturity at various levels.

The businesses that are mature on the digital intensity are better at driving profits through their prevailing assets while those mature on the transformation management intensity tend to be more rewarding.

Based on revenue per employee and fixed asset income, the digital fashionista and digirati businesses increase average business performance by 6-9%. Being matured in both dimensions, digirati businesses outperform on multiple financial measures. Digital fashionistas, strong on digital intensity, drives 16% more revenue through their workforce and physical assets than digital conservatives do. On an average, digital conservatives and digirati are 9% to 26% more profitable based on the net profit margin than their competitors. For these businesses, strong vision, and power help to align investments along a mutual goal.

Digital beginners are several years from achieving the digital maturity level that their digirati competitors already have.

Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together – Vincent Van Gogh

While you cannot make your business digitally mature overnight, you can always start your journey by taking small steps like encouraging innovation, cultivating digitally minded culture, planning strategies with longer horizons, adapting to the market changes and scaling small digital experiments into big initiatives to impact overall business.

Words to the Wise

The time to digitally mature is now. You can only have complete knowledge of what digital maturity is for your business once you start working towards it.

Reference: MITSloan Research "The Advantages of Digital Maturity" - https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-advantages-of-digital-maturity

We have witnessed several decades of technology revolution, yet there are so many myths and hyperbole surrounding digital transformation.Digital Transformation is a nuanced and intricate subject, and many leaders are engulfed with assumptions and confusions that barricade them from adopting technology while looking to embark on the digital transformation journey.

Check out some of the most-hyped myths that needs to be dismissed once and for all:

Myth no. 1. - Transformation Means Changing Your Business Fundamentals

Digital transformation does not change your business fundamentals. It helps you in transforming the business operations, processes, and competencies with technology and discover new business opportunities in a strategic and prioritized manner. Most transformations are pillared on the effective use of the tried and tested technology (for example – networking and databases, ERPs, CRMs).

Companies like Airbnb and Uber revolutionized the way we book taxis and hotels, but their rise to market supremacy came from leveraging most common networking technologies already popular among the consumers: websites, mobile phones and apps for location tracking and real time transactions.

Myth no. 2. - Going Digital is Risky and Expensive

It is not about "how much money you are spending" but "is it worth it?"

Business and investment go hand in hand. Digital transformation is about strategically positioning your company in the market to profitably sustain, compete, and respond to emerging market realities. You may want to wait, observe competitors, and then take a leap, but the pace at which technology adoption and advancements are increasing, your position may get further and further behind the competition resulting in irrelevance. In addition, the learnings from the observation may not be relevant when you plan to plunge on the tech adoption journey.

Myth no. 3. - Digital Transformation is All About Technology

“Technology adoption envelops people, processes, values, culture, and vision.”

Digital transformation is much more than technology. On one hand, it is important to augment the core capabilities to bridge physical and digital worlds through different platforms, on the other hand it is important to reimagine your business processes and encourage the right mindset to augment the current organizational practices. It guides you to embrace a clear vision, implement a behavioral change, and support each other for the best output.

Myth no. 4. - Digital Transformation is Meant for IT Companies

Whether it is the mining industry that is utilizing IoT to track and monitor equipment, or a manufacturing unit striving to improve efficiency through an automated line, or a government website looking to connect databases and consolidate information to simplify and make the user interactions of the citizens meaningful and satisfying, every sector has a lot to gain from digital transformation.

Similarly, companies in banking, finance, health care and pharmacy, automobile, tourism, entertainment, media, and other domains can reap a lot of benefits from tech adoption.

Myth no. 5. - Digital Transformation is Not for Small Companies

82% of SMBs have implemented some level of digital transformation in their businesses. - Techaisle

Digital adoption is not restricted to a company’s size. As the demand from the hyper adoptive consumers continues to gain impetus, it is imperative for small and medium businesses to engage in strategic approach that will help to embrace and optimize business for the digital future. The end goal is to enhance operational efficiency, encourage customer-centric processes, break down silos and ensure all the departments can collaborate seamlessly throughout the organization.

Myth no. 6. - Only the Top Management Leads to Successful Digital Adoption

71% of leaders say the workforce is important in supporting their digital transformation strategy. - IndustryWeek

Leaders understand the business’ goals and vision, identify the gaps, and recommend solutions to fix them efficiently. But they are certainly not the only ones as the employees play a major part too.

There are high chances that your employees do not like the new ways and technology to accomplish tasks. Too many steps to execute, or constant reliance on user manuals, there can be many reasons. Therefore, the top management must clear the objectives of technology adoption to the employees with frequent meetings, transparent communication and training sessions.

Of course, simply dismissing these myths won’t enable you to derive a winning transformation strategy. There is a lot more that goes in but ironing out what’s important and acknowledging the fact that transformation takes time in giving returns would help to lay down the cornerstone for successful transformation.

“There's a lot of automation that can happen that isn't a replacement of humans but of mind-numbing behavior.” - Stewart Butterfield

Robotic Process Automation is revolutionalizing the business workflow. Its adoption streamlines business processes, reduces human efforts & errors, shifts focus on valuable and rewarding aspects of work, delivers better output rapidly, and enhances the efficiency of the workforce.

Recently global IT research and advisory firms like Gartner declared RPA as the fastest-growing segment in the worldwide enterprise software market. However, many businesses are still unaware of the positive impact of virtual workforce capabilities and opportunities. The challenges that they face are -

What are the processes that are well-suited for automation?

How to identify the right business operation for RPA adoption??

If your business is struggling with the same questions, check out the most common business operations suitable for RPA.

Workforce Dependent Processes

According to a report published by Smartsheet, more than 40% of respondents said they spend at least a quarter of their workweek on manual, repetitive tasks, with email, data collection, and data entry occupying the most time.

These scenarios are quite common in the business world where the employees perform tedious and monotonous work every day. Such functions waste their time and affect the overall efficiency and productivity.

For instance- in financial institutes, customer onboarding becomes a nerve-wracking experience, for employees dealing with a large number of prospects and clients every day. The processes include-

long trails of paperwork

extensive documentation

tedious approvals causing delays

identity verification processes, and more

RPA is the sign of relief for such employees and also a great way to deliver improved customer experience.

Process with less human intervention

How will you feel if you listen to the same problems from multiple people every day?

Tech support employees have to listen about the same problem from multiple people and repeat the similar process to fix similar system failures every day. Also, they are always extra loaded with work. So, what is the easy way out? RPA is the answer!

Such diagnostic processes need limited end-to-end human intervention. Getting started with RPA can streamline their workflow and free the support staff from anxiety and stress so that they can focus better on priorities.

High volume work

One of the key findings of the Deloitte Global RPA Survey states that 53% of their respondents started to implement some form of RPA, and this percentage will become 72% by 2022.

Many times, the high volume of work becomes overwhelming for the businesses. Some businesses run round the clock with no opening and closing times. The retail sector can be the best example where the business deals with-

High volume of orders everyday/week

Inventory management

Complaint resolutions

Generating sales reports

RPA implements these and other operations rapidly and accurately helping businesses save hours of work, efforts, and costs.

Rule-based processes

A recent study by A.T. Kearney and Arvato reveals RPA will take over 41 percent of the financial back-office processes and in ten years, it will be 53 percent.

But the truth is, RPA can disrupt not only the back-office functions but also the front office business operations. However, bots are popular in obeying well-defined rules in data-driven processes; the businesses are a little more in favor of adopting automation for back offices.

For instance- in the telecom business, operations that include:

Allotting new SIM to customers

Porting numbers to other operators

Customer conflict resolution

Credit checks for post-paid accounts

Some of these transactions can be easily and efficiently automated, lessen the burden of work and enhance customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

"Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine." ~ Eliyahu Goldratt.

This quote briefly explains the need for identifying legacy business processes that can be automated, to reap the benefits of cognitive and artificial intelligence technologies. It will help the businesses to shift from redundant, low-skilled, rule-based business operations to critical engagements. Such transformations will help the businesses in delivering value, increasing revenue and building a healthier relationship with the clients and customers.

Thriving enterprises have harnessed the power of DevOps for overcoming the bottlenecks of software development and deployment process. The utilization of an effective DevOps strategy has accelerated the performance of businesses with its ability to develop, test, and deploy software at a much higher velocity than legacy enterprises.

DevOps is an asset for enterprises and technology evangelists for a quick and uber effective implementation of the SDLC. Despite this, executives are skeptical about the utilization of DevOps and the revolutionary capability it brings when practiced within enterprises.

We’re here to bust that myth today.

DevOps is a transformative process aiming to automate and organize business processes, workflows, culture and methodology of an organization, aiding them to achieve faster and efficient customers goals.

The foundation of a rewarding DevOps strategy stands tall on four staunch pillars building momentum for competitive businesses with an additional edge.

Automation: CI/CD- Continuous integration and Continuous deployment is an automatic pipeline triggering the entire console on initiated tasks stirring at each phase of process -scheduled, ongoing or expected to happen.

Transformation: Ongoing legacy based technological transformation to new-edge technology like from monoliths to microservices, from stand-alone to dockers and from manual to automated ones.

Orchestration: Automated coordination and management of multiple tasks and its sub tasks executed in a larger workflow to optimize frequent and repetitive processes, promises successful deliverables and shorter time-to-market.

Collaboration: Increased collaboration and communication between different departments of a single enterprise executing same project, same code, tool and responsibility.

DevOps is a continuous improvement process for businesses aiming for an easy collaboration and communication across multiple departments of a single organization. These pillars help enterprises attain the highest possible levels of automation, multi-level testing and sustainable feedback loops to developers which improves directly reduces the sprint time while optimizing the overall project lifecycle.

Understanding DevOps Orchestration

Technology breakthrough has brought complex deployment challenges to the fore - clustered applications, multiple cloud infrastructures, various datacenters and interdependencies and more. That’s why the need for strategic automation to optimize processes has never been more apparent than now leading to the rise of Orchestration.

Orchestration in DevOps begins with Automation. It can be automating a single task, repeated technical tasks, settings to launch apps or changing the database entry, both on PCs and in the Cloud.

Consider the case of the retail giant, Walmart.

Walmart, is a strong advocate of the belief that Automation using DevOps leads to reduced time-to market, cost optimization and greater deployment efficiency.

Walmart Labs created an open source application, Hapi- a node.js framework for reusable logic instead of spending massive time on creating and executing the code again and again. This successful DevOps approach relies on cloud-based technology that automates and accelerates application deployment. In addition, they have recently built their own cloud and deployed more than 100,000 Open stack programs and is going head strong on this agile DevOps approach.

Types of Orchestration

Cloud Orchestration: Cloud orchestration is a programmable technology with multiple workflows of distinctive cloud platforms such as public cloud or private cloud infrastructure. It aims to automate tasks into a cohesive funneled workflow adhering to IT permissions and policies.

Service Orchestration: Service orchestration is a ‘end-to end’ service solution inclusive of multiple functional processes from designing of application to the final product release and its consultation- a holistic end-to-end delivery. Automation of multiple tasks works on a rule-based concept where processes are categorized and handled as per domain-specificity or siloed operational or IT environments.

Release Orchestration: An easy blend of tools and practices that you have developed can be easily orchestrated and managed in pipelines without any blockage. It holds an expertise in each process involved in release from testing, deployment or even the on-going continuous process. It fosters smoother collaboration between external and internal systems using Continuous integration software like Jenkins and JIRA.

Is Automation misleading the phenomenon of Orchestration?

Many still lack the clarity between Orchestration and Automation which misleads most of them. Automation itself is a part of Orchestration. Let’s explore the differences between the two.

Automation is a specific task allowed to execute on its own. Simplest example could be running a shutdown command in your windows system or in IT can be running a single line code several times.

While on the other hand, Orchestration means automating multiple tasks such as IT workflows at once for multiple ongoing processes. For instance, mobile and database orchestration.

Automation and Orchestration continuously play a vital role in improving tasks and automation, between multiple teams – both IT and operational. They work towards achieving an ideal product that incorporates a larger amount and saves majority of time while yet fulfilling all the requested needs.

Some commonly cited benefits of DevOps Orchestration include:

Decreasing IT costs: Better use the budget for more innovative new projects

Decreasing friction: More collaboration and less mismanagement is observed between teams

Improved Productivity: Simultaneous task processing leads to better productivity

Standardizing processes: Maintain a same product and process across spectrum that are more consistent and reliable

Digital Transformation has given several businesses the renewed zeal of tapping into their target audiences with hopes of conversion. As discussed earlier, Digital Transformation is an enterprise-wide strategy to maximize the potential of technological innovations to streamline business processes and have a seamless revenue stream.

It is relatively easier for enterprises to get access to technological innovations or gadgets that can make a difference in productivity. Then, what differentiates a business from its competitor?

The answer is the ‘Content Experience’ of the potential client/customer.

According to Gartner, Content Management is the “process of creating, managing, and delivering content over one or more digital channels through the use of specific management solutions based on a core repository.”

It is the Content Experience that ensures your target client thinks of your brand that too when the time is right and becomes a loyal customer. In the era of Omnichannel communication, your target customer begins consuming content at an overwhelming rate.

How will then your target customer recall your brand?

Your content management system must be customized to your business objectives while facilitating a ‘personalized experience’ for your target audience to reduce the target user’s effort.

Not just any content management system, enterprises need to have a robust CMS that serves their end objectives. Businesses today need more than just a regular CMS. They need a chatbot powered CMS, which maximizes the content ROI while promising a personalized customer experience that builds loyalty.

Your CMS has enough fuel, the content, to power your content chatbots for a superior customer experience.

Google alone now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. - Internet live stats

Lesser the effort the potential customer makes, higher are the chances of his loyalty. - CEB study.

​For instance, IVR has been around for a long time to assist customers but it often becomes frustrating not to mention confusing. In addition, people often end up talking to a human agent if they can’t find what they were looking for which takes up a longer time.

It takes a long time for the IVR system to process what the caller needs. On the other hand, traditional or AI powered chatbot solves this concern in a jiffy by providing an intuitive caller experience. AI Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) that help the bot understand the requests of the user even if the user uses regular language. Once the chatbot understands what the user needs, it redirects the user accordingly.

What is a Chatbot?

According to Techopedia, a chatbot is an AI program simulating human conversation using key pre-calculated user phrases and auditory or text-based signals.

Chatbots are widely used for:

Marketing Systems

Customer Service

Social Networks

Instant Messengers

Virtual assistants

How do Chatbots tie up in a CMS?

Before we understand how we can factor chatbots into a CMS, we need to understand the basic components of a Chatbot. Also, it is important to note that not each chatbot is powered by AI.

Contexts, Entities, Intents, Utterances and Responses are the five main components of a basic Chatbot. Context is the reason the user ended up interacting with the Chatbot in the first place. Entity refers to the ‘content’ or ‘the subject matter’ the user is talking about with the chatbot.

Intent is the desired final action the chatbot is supposed to make once th e interaction with the human is over. Utterances are variations of intents – same thing asked in different likely ways. These can be alternate questions in your CMS.

Responses are, as the name suggests, the intended answers to the ‘intent’ we have specified. These can be defined in the CMS. In fact, each component of a chatbot can be specifically configured in a customized CMS.

The information needed for the components is something the businesses usually have available; however, this content needs to be recreated in a way chatbots can use. It is important to centralize this content so it becomes structured, easily discoverable, personalized and can also be automated with relative ease.

Chatbot software allows to store this data in a centralized manner; however, storing this data in your CMS which permits the chatbot to connect with an open API connect is a preferable method. This chatbot can then pull the content through the API if your Enterprise Content Model facilitates structured content.

That’s why enterprises must understand how we can structure the content and organize it in a thorough process so the chatbots can utilize this inventory. Although, chatbots can be helpful for enterprises of all scales and sizes, enterprises that generate a large volume of content daily tend to benefit the most.

Industry leaders such as telecommunication giant Vodafone, banking leader Bank of America, social networks like Facebook and several others have widely begun using chatbots and are already experiencing astounding results with accuracy.

However, before diving face forward into the world of Chatbots integrated with CMS, enterprises must consider these few points:

Can human interaction be minimized or eliminated replacing the process with a Chatbot?

Is the infrastructure ready to be integrated with the enterprise technology infrastructure?

Can the chatbots easily integrate into existing CRM tools?

Can the chatbots facilitate tracking of the visitor activity?

Is the system private, secure and allows for access control?

How humanly or empathetic does the content sound?

Is it possible to allow a human to take over the query?

An Oracle survey involving nearly 800 decision makers across France, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK suggests that nearly 80% brands aim to use chatbots by the year 2020. There are many benefits of having a robust CMS equipped with chatbots:

Uninterrupted Live Chat with Potential Leads

24x7 Customer Support

Bias free query resolution

Increase in Brand Recall Value

Increased employee productivity

Reuse and consistent exposure of enterprise content on relevant channels

And more…

Whether it’s about integrating traditional or NLP based intelligent chatbots into your legacy CMS or creating a chatbot ready scalable CMS from scratch, Cygnet infotech has you covered. CMS experts at Cygnet with their years of diverse experience and deep domain expertise create unparalleled digital experiences customized to your enterprise’s needs.