‘Digital transformation is an ideology’ - It has the power to lead an enterprise to the next level systematically and seamlessly. Of the many definitions of Digital Transformation the one that summarizes it the best is –

“Digital transformation is the deliberate and ongoing digital evolution of a company, business model, idea process, or methodology, both strategically and tactically.”

Digital transformation was on its way from as early as the 1990’s. It began with connecting companies with customers but purchases were largely made from the brick and mortar outlets. From 2000 onwards the digital ambitions of companies grew quickly with the rise of smart devices and social media platforms. Soon enterprises across sectors began to understand that transformation needs to be placed at the helm of every organization to enable an enriching journey of growth and learning across functions and levels.

Despite this foresight, transformation was met by resistance largely a result of the working in silos culture and the apprehension surrounding the word – CHANGE. So organizations had to concentrate equally on mindset shift by creating dedicated teams and designations to internalize the transformation process completely. In 2010 a new title appeared in the organizational charts - Chief Digital Officers (CDOS).

Almost around the same period i.e. 1990’s SAAS based technology first services had started making ripples in the IT sector. The journey of this type of companies has been slow and steady. The shrinking cost of computers, ‘Bloatware’, the Dotcom boom and the inefficiency of ASP’s are all factors that have been instrumental in shaping up the growth of SAAS. So there was a need and a product to meet that need evolving all at the same time – the classis economic model.

The last decade has been exciting and magical where there has been a huge disruption in terms of large amount of SAAS based companies thrusting their ways and changing the entire dynamics of how traditional companies looked at transforming their businesses. These smaller but more agile maverick companies build solutions which helped companies relook at the way they could transform every function be it finance, SCM, logistics, retail or research. Sales enablement has gone from training to collaborating to how to sell to gamification and there is no limit to what number of tools have come in within the sales function.

Come 2019 the forward looking beyond the curve technologies such as AI/ ML machine learning NLP got a boost with the onset of the pandemic. Whatever sluggishness was lying within the organizations to adopt digital transformation as a way of life was broken and the entire process to move towards emerging as a digital core organization was fast forwarded by at least 10 years. Today we stand at a point where the technology teams unanimously agree that they are challenged by the speed at which the business is asking for transformation.

The cost imperatives put by the management, lack of time to evaluate the long term impact and scalability, inadequate benchmarking to find the ideal solutions from the market are the cons of the pandemic generated immediate need to cope up.

One question that arises is that ‘Is this transformation a result of external factors only?’ Or there is a deeper meaning to its existence. Every organization whether digitized or not is facing an influx of massive data from multiple sources and this data can be deployed in infinite ways to better the organization. The magnitude is so strong that is demands disablement of legacy systems as they are incapable of extending their bandwidth to the current level. It needs to cascade to make way for modern ERP solutions that act as a strong powerhouse that provides a structured database, thus forming the digital core of an organization.

Application Suites (ERP, SCM and CRM) with a sophisticated application platform can interact with your ERP model making in house projects and third party inclusions more efficient and effective. This setup when nurtured, can provide the organization with a competitive advantage at both the tactical and strategic level empowering the entire hierarchy to identify and rectify potential bottlenecks across every function and also to observe trends through algorithms and predictive analytics. So much can be accomplished with sophisticated data management equipped with data access thereby making the already available information work for an organization.

With this the genesis of digital transformation is rewritten where organizations don’t turn to it for survival rather they adopt it for evolving to their fullest potential.