FEATURE: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
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Digital Transformation is top
priority for most enterprises,
especially as we turn our
attention to the new year
and having an eye on the
ball is essential. Geng Lin,
Chief Technology Officer,
F5 Networks, suggests
some services to help
application owners improve
application performance,
security, operability and
adaptability without significant
development effort.
I
n recent years, enterprises in every
industry sector have been embarking
on a Digital Transformation journey in
one way or another. Business enterprises
are taking advantage of the proliferation of
digital technologies to define new business
models or to improve business productivity
with existing models.
Key digital propellers such as the Internet
(as a ubiquitous reachability platform),
applications and open source proficiency
(as a skill set platform), cloud (as a pervasive
computing and data platform), and, of late,
Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning
(as an insight discovery platform) help
enterprise businesses to improve business
productivity and customer experiences.
While the pace of Digital Transformation
varies based on the business and the
sector it’s in, overall, the journey of Digital
Transformation has three stages:
3
• Task automation. In this stage,
digitalisation leads businesses to turn
human-oriented business tasks to
various forms of ‘automation’, which
means more applications are introduced
or created as part of the business flow.
This began with automating well-
defined, individual tasks to improve
efficiencies. A common example is IVR
systems that answer common questions
about a product or service but may need
to hand off to a human representative.
Individual tasks are automated, but not
consistently integrated.
• Digital expansion. As businesses
start taking advantage of cloud-
native infrastructures and driving
automation through their own software
development, it leads to a new
generation of applications to support
the scaling and further expansion
of their digital model. The driver
behind this phase is business leaders
who become involved in application
decisions designed to differentiate or
provide unique customer engagement.
For example, healthcare providers
are increasingly integrating patient
records and billing with admission,
discharge, and scheduling systems.
Automated appointment reminders
can then eliminate manual processes.
Focusing on end-to-end business process
improvement are common themes in
this phase.
• AI-assisted business augmentation.
As businesses further advance on their
digital journey and leverage more
advanced capabilities in application
platforms, business telemetry and data
analytics, and Machine Learning (ML)/
AI technologies, businesses will become
AI-assisted. This phase opens new areas
of business productivity gains that were
Digital
Transformation
The
40
INTELLIGENTCIO
phases of
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