Digital transformation is real. It’s here. And it just might make or break the future of your business.
It’s clear that we’ve entered a new age where digital transformation is the standard of success. Whether you’re new to digital transformation or have heard all about it, you might as well get comfortable with the discomfort that the process can entail.
In this piece, we’ve detailed five common hurdles to digital transformation and highlighted how knowledge automation helps with each.
1. Defining Digital Transformation as a Vision and Goal
For digital transformation to be successful, you have to know what it is and what it’s not. It’s not about focusing on a new technology or digital service or a one-size-fits-all philosophy.
It starts with understanding your business at its core and defining an overall customer vision with practical goals for how you can improve, if not reinvent, your business model using new processes, technologies, and talent. Ultimately, it’s all in the service of bringing new value to customers and outperforming in the market.
Since today’s digital landscape changes all too often, you will want to set shorter term goals that ladder up to an overall vision. You will also want to deploy technologies that can mesh with existing business processes and dynamically adapt rather than adapting your processes to a new technology.
Knowledge automation does both. It can handle existing business processes and data structures without requiring you to reengineer your business processes. As a result, you can achieve up to 90% end-to-end automation much faster than if you used robotic process automation (RPA). In the latter case, you must standardize your business processes first and then apply automation.
2. Winning over the C-Suite and Work Culture
The scope of a digital transformation can be enormous, whether your business is building a mobile app or modernizing its IT infrastructure. That transformation can require budget, talent, new technologies, cross-team collaboration, and more. That’s why it’s wise to win support both from the top down and the bottom up.
For CEOs or CIOs, knowledge automation offers unique benefits as a new technology. According to a recent Gartner CEO survey, there’s already consensus that automation is a game-changer. In this light, knowledge automation is even more desirable, given its advantages over RPA. It can be deployed quickly, doesn’t require business processes to be changed, and can adapt to changing business demands on the fly.
Knowledge automation also compliments the need for bottom up support. To many, a digital transformation can bring about unwanted change. Some might worry about losing their jobs while others might resent learning new technologies. The good news is, HIRO takes minimal time to set up and use before it starts rapidly automating tasks. Through knowledge automation, employees have more time to focus on complex projects for a digital transformation, not less.
3. Outlasting the “Legacy” of Legacy Systems
The systems that brought you success in the past likely won’t be the ones that do so in the future. From old CRM and ERP software to dusty data servers, legacy systems tend to be less secure, costly to maintain, and incompatible with new technologies.
Legacy software systems in particular can silo data, preventing your company from discovering big data insights that drive transformative change. Those silos can also complicate collaboration between teams and stifle data compliance efforts, such as for GDPR. For many companies, however, simply turning off a legacy system isn’t an option. It makes more sense to find innovative, flexible technologies that can both work with those systems today and catalyze growth for the demands of tomorrow.
Knowledge automation can serve as that bridge, whether for seamlessly mapping data between systems or automating old business processes until they’re no longer needed.
4. Leveraging Business and IT as One
The more business teams and IT collaborate, the greater the chances of digital transformation success. According to a report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, that collaboration, however, can be a challenge because of differing priorities.
IT tends to be concerned with operational efficiency, security and integrating technology into legacy systems while business-focused departments prioritize cost-cutting and revenue growth. Due to this misalignment, both IT and outside departments can lose face when digital transformation efforts lag or prove ineffective.
Knowledge automation can be applied to just about any business process across many different industries, not just IT. Given that it’s easily adaptable and scalable in cost, it can both be used for innovation in other departments and rapidly carry out up to 90% of lower level IT work, like L1 or L2 tickets.
5. Securing the Right Talent and Budget
Companies face the daunting tasks of maintaining legacy systems while finding budget for the most promising, impactful talent and digital technologies. Depending on your transformation projects, the talent needed—data scientists, DevOps managers, software engineers, product managers—can be expensive and scarce.
Since digital transformation projects can rapidly change direction, allocating the right budget can be tricky. One method is to allocate a budget upfront and build-in caveats for unforeseen challenges. Another method is to allocate in a way that’s similar to a software development workflow, setting aside funds for each stage of a project or longer-term plan.
Fortunately, HIRO builds on the knowledge of existing talent and then learns how to efficiently automate business processes. It also scales as you need it, making it much more cost-effective. For these reasons, it offers an overall lower barrier to entry with fewer “hidden costs” than other automation solutions.
Transform or Be Transformed
According to the International Data Center, worldwide spending on digital transformation will reach $2.3 trillion in 2023. That’s over half of all information and communications technology (ICT) investments. This spending alone should suggest that the rewards of digital transformation far outweigh the risks of staying static.
At arago, we understand the hurdles enterprises face when digitally transforming their business. Our HIRO platform alleviates many of the usual pain points. It can be easily deployed within existing systems, adapts to rapidly changing workflows, and scales based on your investment.
Digital transformation is no longer a question of when. It’s a question of how soon.