It’s just as likely, however, that digital transformation for your business or organization may be as simple as providing everyone in the organization with new laptops and access to Microsoft Teams or Office365. That’s the thing about digital transformation: there is no one-size-fits-all description or set of technologies that add up to digital transformation. Digital transformation, it turns out, has nothing to do with the sum of its parts.
Defining digital transformation today
So how do you define digital transformation job function email list today? In the 1980s and 1990s, digital transformation was all about digitizing business processes and workflows (ERP, CRM, BPO, SCM, and other large-scale software projects were all the rage), making client/server work as advertised (Remember Windows 95?! Grrr.), connecting facilities and branch offices through high-speed wide area and campus networks, finding enough spinning discs to store an ever-increasing mountain of digital data, building out data centers,; and much more.
Even though many of these activities are still ongoing (and still carry mission-critical importance), these types of projects were more foundational than transformative by today’s standards. They were internally focused. The goal was to move the organization away from time-consuming, manual processes, improve efficiency, and save money.
And then a pandemic hit
It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic expert tips from trainer jessica stokes supercharged digital transformation. Companies did in days what they were planning to do in months or years pre-COVID. Grocers like Kroger made curbside pickup and delivery center pieces of the shopping experience. Restaurants, hard hit by government shutdowns, also moved rapidly to adopt online ordering, curbside pickup, and delivery as the mainstays of their business models.
Through the use of the cloud, mega-companies with hundreds of thousands of employees managed to send most of them home and still maintain their day-to-day operations.
And, while IT scrambled to find more laptops, headsets, and VPN licenses, business leaders realized that the digital transformation projects they had engaged in pre-COVID were saving their businesses. This was a revelation to many. Technology and IT, it turned out, really were more than just cost centers.
The blurry line between internal and external
The common thread that binds these 2 examples to today’s definition of digital transformation and what makes it so different from brazil data days past, is the fact that organizations can no longer choose between internally and externally focused initiatives. They have to do both at the same time.
If an organization ignores modernizing their data storage network while building out a customer-facing app, for example, and that causes long delays, their customers will move to a competitor. And, because there is almost no dividing line separating business from consumer technology today, this happens in both the B2B and B2C worlds with equal rapidity.