Digital Transformation

Building Intelligent Enterprises

Anup Maheshwari

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119540854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: IT Industry
• Index: Business

Building Intelligent Enterprises by leveraging the emerging and next-generation technologies to accelerate the adoption of digital transformation

The speed of innovation and emerging IT technologies are changing at a very fast pace and enterprises are eager to join the digital revolution so they can stand above the competition and succeed as the enterprise of tomorrow. This book is an attempt to make the enterprise intelligent by providing the path to digital transformation and the adoption of new IT methods, tools and technologies.

This book has been organized to cover the following topics: Digital Transformation, Design Thinking, Agile, DevOps, Robotic Process Automation, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Drones, Augmented and Virtual Reality, 3D Printing, Big Data, Analytics, Cloud Computing, APIs, and SAP Leonardo. No prior knowledge of any technical coding or language is necessary to understand the content of this book.

• End-to-end storyline to accelerate the enterprise's digital transformation journey
• How an enterprise can stay relevant, compete, and perform in the digital economy
• How to leverage these technologies to build intelligent enterprises
• Understand and apply the emerging technologies across key business processes
• Industry-specific Use Cases for all technologies as a reference point to build the business case for implementation

The book is very well suited towards the C-Suite executives, both IT and business leaders, directors and managers, project managers, solution architects, and all professionals who have an interest and desire to keep up-to-date with the latest technological trends, looking for a career change, want to help enterprise adapt and onboard the digital roadmap, or have an agenda to digitize key processes within the enterprise to make it intelligent.

PART I
Introduction

CHAPTER 1
Digital Transformation

This chapter provides an overview of the digital transformation and its importance for the survival of the enterprise. It also discusses the factors, impact, value drivers, implementation methodology, and some of the emerging digital themes across business functions and industries that can be leveraged by the enterprise to innovate, create new business models, and become intelligent.

Digital Transformation

Innovation and emerging IT technologies are changing at a very fast pace; the question is – are the enterprises ready to keep up with the pace, jump into the race to digital transformation, and become intelligent in the process?

Before we proceed, let's understand the term “digital” as used in the context here. It refers to the power of collective information that is generated in the ecosystem and the technology that keeps the customers connected with the business resources. Digital transformation involves the usage of new technologies to drive significant improvements in all business segments. This includes capitalizing on new opportunities as well as effectively transforming existing businesses and technology that enable them. Digital transformation is the state of how promptly an enterprise can cater to the changing customer demands and turn the technology into business outcomes and value.

New IT is about reinventing the enterprise's business by leveraging the exponential power of digital to drive new levels of operational efficiency, innovate new products and services, build new sources of growth and revenue models, be agile in the workplace, and provide personalized customer experience.

The typical barriers for an enterprise to unlock the power of digital transformation include complex business processes, highly customized solutions, stringent policies and practices, business units working in silos within the enterprise, lack of proper infrastructure, the gap in skill sets, and multiple and disparate architectures in the ecosystem.

To overcome these barriers, the digital transformation needs to be driven by the people in conjunction with the business strategy and technology providing the requisite support. Some of the key questions that the enterprise needs to ask and get answers for before proceeding with the transformation are as follows:

• How shall I adapt to new digital trends?
• How shall I identify new opportunities and business scenarios?
• How shall I get started?
• How shall I attract new talent from the market?
• How shall I incorporate change management?
• How shall I convince the stakeholders to approve the idea?
• How shall I internally fund and govern digital transformation projects?
• How shall I help the employees and business partners get connected through digital means?

Digital transformation enabled by cloud‐based applications and supported by emerging technologies will become the central nervous system of the intelligent enterprise of the twenty‐first century.

What Causes Business Disruption

In today's world, smartphones have become a commodity used by almost everyone. This is a perfect example of disruption, as this device has disrupted thousands of businesses and enterprises. Before the invention of the smartphone, there were cameras to take pictures, alarm clocks for wake‐up, navigation systems in cars for guidance on the road, and video recorders to shoot recordings. Now, all these functionalities and more have been combined in one device and millions of enterprises that manufactured or traded these products as part of their business got disrupted. They either went out of business or changed their line of business.

Smartphones enabled various applications and empowered the consumer to order a taxi, book airline tickets, check the menu of a restaurant, or make a doctor's appointment just by sitting at home, as smartphones have the capability to connect with people and systems all around the world. This innovation has led businesses to become increasingly complex as the individual consumers have now become exponentially powerful with the tools at their disposal. A consumer in today's digital and connected economy can perform tasks that only large enterprise could do some years ago.

If enterprises want to outpace the disruption that is ongoing in the entire world, they need to equip themselves with technology that will help them adapt to the change quickly.

Factors That Influence Digital Transformation

An enterprise would need the cloud computing platform to run a successful digital transformation, as the cloud provides a scalable, flexible, elastic, easily accessible, and cost‐efficient platform to run the business. Without the cloud layer, the enterprise would not be able to achieve the required automation and orchestration for the next layer, known as the data layer, that comprises big data and analytics.

Both structured and unstructured data from the internal ecosystem and the external environment is getting streamed into the enterprise's database, which might be a rational database, a relational database, or nonrelational data sets. This data needs to be transformed into essential business insights so that it can be consumed by the sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, and various product divisions to make informed and smart decisions. In order to get the information, the user needs to access it through the devices layer known as mobility.

In the post–personal computers era, users have the flexibility to work on several devices such as mob...