Digital technologies have profoundly changed everything in our lives. From our daily tasks to the way we do business, work, buy and live, digital technologies play an important role in everything. They have altered our society and are even impacting all the business functions and industries, either directly or indirectly.
Digital business today is mainly used in the context of digital transformation. Digital businesses today are largely impacted by digital technologies. These technologies offer new ways to collaborate, connect and conduct your business and build bridges between people and technology.
The ever-evolving digital technologies have also challenged the existing business models. The key driving force behind it is the capacity of innovation that it offers and the increased consumerisation of IT. Digital business is at the stage where you can call it ‘converged’.
It is fully integrated and connected. From the perspective of technology, it goes beyond the famous third platforms, and we are witnessing some amazing evolutions today, including but not limited to the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Mobile, etc.
Digital business is a business with agile processes and a people-centric view. Digital technology, on the other hand, is used to enable all the players (employees, managers, customers, etc.) to optimize all their business functions and succeed in making their business more profitable and relevant. In short, it creates value for the digital business.
Digital technology helps digital businesses make themselves better and hence more profitable. Digital technology means that the devices can be lighter, faster, versatile and more compact today.
Large amounts of information can be stored remotely or locally and can be moved around virtually almost instantaneously. The term ‘information’ has also expanded to include audio, video and photos and is no longer limited to just numbers and words.
With digital technology, businesses are able to yield the following benefits:
Ability to Open Up New Frontiers, New Business
Digital technology opens up new frontiers for businesses. They are not limited to time and space anymore. Thanks to digital technologies, businesses can now venture into unexplored terrains.
The boundaries of time and space have been eliminated. They can now touch all corners of the globe and get customers from anywhere on the planet. In addition, digital technologies have also helped in improving access to learning opportunities.
With communication advances, you can easily communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. In short, digital technologies and digital transformation have actually changed the business landscape altogether, and in a good way.
Ability to Adopt/Imbibe/Invent New Business Models
With emerging ‘smart’ technologies, digitization, virtualisation and modernisation of IT, businesses today have an improved ability to invent, adopt or imbibe new business models.
They can work on what they think is the best and test all the possibilities before deciding on anything. Business decisions become easy when you know the outcome. This has helped businesses all over the world in adopting new business models.
These new models have improved not only their return on investment, but also the strength and longevity of the relationship with their customers.
Ability to Adopt to Think Around the Customers
In today’s competitive business world, understanding your customers is more important than ever. If you want to run a successful business, you need to provide a strong customer experience.
Digital businesses today need to invest in digital technologies to make sure they provide their customers with the best possible service. The idea is to think around the customers and plan your digital business accordingly.
With everything digital, businesses can use digital technology and analytics to learn about the buying journey of their customers, as well as the right time and place to engage them.
Organisations today live in a world where a business’s competition is just a click away. Thus, customers expect exceptional customer service from businesses.
If a business fails to impress them, they are not shy in expressing their level of dissatisfaction among their network of friends and even beyond. They are more powerful than ever, and it clearly seems that the power balance between the business and the consumer has shifted.
Most of the organisations these days are configured for the mass market and mass media era. There are some digital elements bolted onto the traditional sales funnel that consumers have to move through in their buying journey.
Digital transformation, on the other hand, takes a step back and examines the journey of the new digital customers. It takes a look at how consumers interact with organisations in real life and online.
All these different things are looked at by the organisations, allowing them to adapt to this new flow with necessary changes that are driven by a digital strategy.
Thanks to digital technology, digital businesses today are able to analyse the user’s traffic paths to find out the web pages and links that are engaging them and the ones that are driving them away.
This helps businesses by providing them insights into what they can do to retain their customers and drive them down the funnel. The customer’s user experience can also be significantly improved through digital analytics.
Bottom Line Improvement
Thanks to digital technologies, digital businesses have been able to improve their bottom line. Their businesses are giving them a better return on investments.
Their profitability is improving while there is a marked decrease in their expenses. Thanks to the ever-evolving digital technology, nothing is impossible now.
Just as digital transformation constantly changes, so does its constituent elements. Most of the digital transformation activities today involve innovative use of digital technologies.
It includes but is not limited to analytics, machine learning, new devices, IoT, etc. In fact, digital transformation has evolved into a data-led change centric medium for businesses, which is working for them currently.
This may change into something different as we continue to get more elaborate and effective technologies in the future.
Ask yourself and your team these questions BEFORE you decide to invest in digital:
1. What are we prepared to invest NOW and what rewards should we expect from this over the next 1-5 years? Where is the payoff point, financially speaking?
2. If we invest $ in one space, what might that save us in time, resources, process and other systems and what does that equate to in a $ sense?
3. What does digitising a part of our business do to our customers? Does it engage or negate them and what is the cost of both scenarios? Over time, how will digitising this part of the business help them do business with us?
Come back to this space for more information on digital business view.
