Straight A’s: How Applications, Automation, Analytics and AI Transform Businesses

The critical need to digitize your organization is readily apparent: establishing a thriving corporate enterprise that achieves greater profits, surpasses the competition and is sustainable long term. This is even more important today as businesses are looking for strategic maneuvers to survive given the impact the pandemic is having on the economy.

A modern digital workplace, built on proper technology and innovation, does just that, as it empowers employees, partners and customers to achieve their potential. When we talk about a modern digital workplace, we are referring to “digital transformation,” an established business practice that can lead to more efficient work processes, better organizational decision-making, enhanced productivity from distributed work teams, identification of cost optimization, and better customer experiences and satisfaction.

Digital transformation is a term that has been used across industries so regularly over the years that its characterization has become commonplace. However, there is no “standard” to what digital transformation means for a company as the standard varies based on the type of business, ecosystem and infrastructure needs, challenges and aspirations. Simply put, the heart of digital transformation is leveraging modern technology and innovation so that an organization or business can help its people achieve maximum capability and the company processes can run optimally. Digital transformation also helps a business focus on its greatest means of success: its customers. 

As part of the process to embark on a digitized makeover journey, a structured and comprehensive discovery and analysis of your current business context, technology and existing solutions is needed upfront. This assessment and audit will help you identify risks, improvement areas and gaps between your business imperatives and technology – leading to a tailored, effective and pragmatic-phased roadmap and better adoption of technology.

Interestingly, some of the main technology drivers that help achieve digital transformation come from what we might call the “Straight A’s”: applications, automation, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Let’s consider each one.

Applications: Ideal business applications help organizations improve customer relations, manage business processes, enhance productivity and increase profitability. There are cloud-based business application platforms that provide solutions for end-to-end business processes right from strategy development, product development, marketing, customer relationship management, work management, project management, field services, customer services, finance and operations. For example, many businesses use apps in the cloud for project management to securely streamline their entire project lifecycle: opportunity management, planning, resources, time and expenses, customer billing, service and team collaboration.

Automation: You can automate your business processes to remove manual, redundant tasks, which can free staff from repetitive, time-consuming work items. This allows them to focus on initiatives that require their expertise, skill set and mental prowess – projects that can deliver a purposeful impact for the business. Doing so also improves employee morale, increases creativity, and at times, reduces injury due to repetitive motion. Bottom line: automation can lead to reduced labor and operating costs, while enabling demand scaling and increasing business agility.

Analytics: Using actionable analytics, organizations can access relevant data and relationships to take immediate action on business initiatives to achieve stronger outcomes. Analytics can be used to evaluate and analyze various internal and external influencing factors to allow organizations to make fast adjustments to product or business lines to strengthen their performance and reduce risks. Moreover, analytics can be used to identify new revenue opportunities in specific markets, and to look ahead and predict future market behavior so that businesses can create products now that will meet demand later on.

AI: Artificial intelligence has taken the business world by storm and for good reason. With AI, you can literally transform business processes into intelligent systems that will help you identify patterns, gain deeper insights from your data, and leverage data science to improve fact-based decision-making. The performance and capacity of various cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS or Google Cloud make AI very effective and timely. As an example, using AI-powered analytics, companies can swiftly identify inefficiencies to overcome and opportunities to grow, adding to the value of the company.

You’ll want to keep a close eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the progress made by using any or all of the “A” initiatives in relation to stated objectives.

The key takeaway is this: Technology is a great enabler for organizational productivity, creativity, efficiency and improved profits. With a digital transformation program that leverages the “Straight A’s,” you can integrate and connect solutions, platforms, data stores, communication and collaboration needs, and internal and external web and Internet presence. You can also tightly align your digitization effort with top-level business goals. Even more, leveraging technology and innovation in the cloud can help growth-minded companies become more cost competitive with their data discovery needs, more scalable for data storage and future proof.

What we have outlined about applications, automation, analytics and AI only scratches the surface about how these technologies can transform an organization or business. There are of course other technologies and tools that can also be used in your pursuit of modernization. Furthermore, we should account and plan for the four A’s that make up the stages for any implementation of a digital transformation engagement. These include approach, architecture, availability and adoption.

First and foremost, the key is having an unrelenting commitment to advancing your organization. Having this steadfast direction will help you become highly competitive as you achieve greater returns now and into the future.