Embedding digital technology into products, processes and customer interactions can deliver a wide range of business benefits. These include efficiencies in the accounting office and on the assembly line, improved supply chain logistics, and more effective customer engagement strategies. And as technologies continue to evolve, new opportunities emerge for businesses to transform and stay competitive.
A successful digital transformation requires more than just embracing new technology. It also involves integrating technologies into your organization and ecosystem in order to find and create new sources of value, says Rahul Kapoor, management professor and academic director at Wharton’s Leading Digital Transformation Executive Education program. To do this, you must be able to assess and implement new solutions, integrate them with existing technologies and processes, and evolve on a continuous basis.
To achieve this, organizations need to invest in a broad array of talent. Software engineers and cloud computing specialists remain critical, along with DevOps leaders who can streamline development and operations and help teams to continuously iterate software to speed delivery. Other roles to consider include data scientists, who must be able to glean insights from massive troves of data, and artificial intelligence experts – including machine learning, deep neural networks, and generative AI, which can create content and ideas in a way that mirrors human creativity.
To further accelerate digital transformation, business and IT leaders should look for solutions that can scale. This can be as simple as implementing a modular system that allows for easy expansion or it can involve deploying additional resources to support the change and help stakeholders embrace it. In addition, you must ensure that your solution can connect to other systems and that information silos are bridged.