Five Digital Transformation Technologies Making an Impact

The pandemic has forwarded the move to digital and its required innovation due to significant market dynamics and consumer needs changes. Forward-looking companies have focused on the ability to shift gears and accommodate change while minimizing the impact on internal employees and external consumers. Due to the effort and time involved, a key challenge is adapting to new technologies and changes in societal sentiment. Let's look at what is top of mind in digital transformation right now.

Cloud-Native Design As an Innovation Enabler

How are you using the cloud as an enabler of flexibility, speed, agility and resiliency? Companies must start with their desired business outcome. Leverage the cloud-native approach as a source of transformation value instead of increasing IT productivity. Cloud-native technology and design allow technology leaders to restructure, reimagine and reengineer their portfolios to deliver sustainable competitive advantage. Cloud-native development enables a technology team to quickly construct and update applications while improving quality and reducing risk to scalability, reliability and stability in public, private or hybrid multi-clouds.

Building Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance

How can we create trust in artificial intelligence (AI) with technologists and society? Responsible AI is a principle in designing and building systems ethically with human accountability to ensure these systems fairly impact customers, users and employees to create trust. According to Gartner, "By 2023, all personnel hired for AI development and training will have to demonstrate expertise in responsible AI."

What can you do with your initiatives to create responsible AI governance?

• Build the AI as a production-quality system from the ground up as opposed to a proof of concept thrust into use quickly to ensure reliability and safety.
• Create ethical control and governance, making people accountable for the AI.
• Control AI to work only on the intended use case and be understandable by humans.
• Design to be inclusive and treat all people fairly.
• Please plan to be comprehensive when it comes to security, respecting privacy, reliability and safety.

Machine Learning Is Real

Machine learning is a subset of AI that uses algorithms and data to emulate how humans learn while adjusting moderately to improve its accuracy over time. Machine learning provides efficiency gains that decrease manual inspection and give better predictions than if you did not use it. Machine learning's usefulness has gotten to the point where C-level leaders are asked about their plans to leverage it within the business.

Here are some key questions you should ask in order to assess whether machine learning adoption makes sense for your business:

• What are the most important goals to accomplish within the project? Personnel savings or manual effort reduction? Employee engagement by focusing on higher-value activities? Competitive advantage through process automation?
• What is the estimated economic value or importance of a successful project for your company?
• How detrimental are the consequences of errors or failure of the machine learning algorithms?
• What type of data and how much of it is to be analyzed?
• What kind of output should the model generate?
• How would you measure the performance and quality of the machine learning workflow?
• What expertise do I need to take advantage of its use and address challenges?

Enable Speed and Agility in Cybersecurity Initiatives

How can security be an enabler of speed and growth? According to Gartner, "By 2025, 40% of boards of directors will have a dedicated cybersecurity committee." Many technical organizations feel they have a good technical grasp of security concepts, but governance slows initiatives down. There are a few adjustments you can make to increase the velocity and strength of your cyber initiatives.

The first is to extend the security responsibility from a dedicated team to everyone in the technology organization. Enable software developers to build security and compliance within code through education, training and working closely with security experts to address security issues before they arise in production. The second is to apply developer concepts to security instead of compliance oversight. Incorporate DevSecOps models so security is a vital part of your agile product process rather than a gate at the end. This approach can enable "security as code" policies and standards to be incorporated throughout the design and architecture.

Leverage Hyper-Automation to Improve Business Outcomes

How can we leverage hyperautomation to optimize customer success and business productivity? The hyperautomation approach is designed to guide organizations to automate as many of their technology and business processes as possible. Hyperautomation is more than just a focus on reducing costs and employee effort. The automation goals are to reduce employee productivity inefficiencies and technology debt to create speed and agility in the business.

Business agility is achieved through the use of technology and cultural change. Focus on how to eliminate or reduce ineffective processes and technology. Hperautomation investments allow employees to focus on higher-value work and respond to customer demand more rapidly and flexibly as the business scales. Incorporating automation technology makes data more accessible and improves communication internally and externally through simplified processes.

Conclusion

Business and technology leaders face many choices of what to incorporate into their digital transformation strategy and plans. The market and customer dynamics are changing due to the 24x7 digitals demands, with consumers and employees demanding ease of use and responsiveness to their needs. The technology concepts we discussed can help you change your organization's operating model. Focus on long-term value for employees and customers versus a short-term cost as critical inputs into your decision-making and choice selection. An experienced advisor can help you make the right choices for your business to create an accelerated roadmap and set you on the path to success.