With rapid shifts in customer behavior and expectations, new economic realities, ecosystem and industry disruptions, as well as innovation in emerging technologies, Digital Transformation has become a critical requirement for all businesses. Organizations, both big and small, are under immense competitive pressure to change in order to compete in a global dynamic market place, aided by digital technologies and over whelming customer expectations.

When a combination of digital technologies and processes are used to drive such a change, a common heard buzzword is ‘Digital Transformation’. In practice, end-to-end customer experience optimization, operational flexibility and innovation are key drivers of digital transformation, along with the development of new revenue sources and information powered ecosystems of value, leading to business model transformations.

Technology remains a vital part of this digital puzzle. To stay relevant, companies, departments, and individuals need to know exactly where business technology is headed, and to be sure to stay on top of each shifting digital trend.

What is 'Digital Transformation'?
Digital transformation is the profound transformation of business and organizational processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage digital technologies and their accelerating impact in a strategic way. It is a technology induced change by social, analytics, or cloud technologies which significantly impacts an organization’s progress and ability to thrive in the wake of future shifts.

In a broad sense, digital transformation can be viewed as a cultural change, as it challenges organizations to innovate, experiment, and go beyond their comfort zone.

Why your business needs 'Digital Transformation'?
In the 'Internet Economy',the customers are in control. They are interacting with your business in new ways and their user experience is heavily influencing their purchase decisions. Since they interact with your business across multiple channels and thousands of digital touch points, their expectations of performance and security are putting unprecedented demands on your business. This is the key reason why businesses need new digital technologies to help them transform, drive new business growth, and stay ahead of current and emerging competitors and innovators.

How 'Digital Transformation' can transform your business?
Agility: There is an urgent need for speed in the fast paced digital economy. When users demand regular updates to their apps, software cycles are short -some times no more than a few weeks. So reducing time-to-decision and time-to-market is essential.

Organizations that have invested rightly in digital technologies have seen a marked improvement in agility.

It is important to recognize that the essence of a true digital transformation strategy lies in its objectives and scope

To stay competitive, your business needs to transform radically to adapt to the demands of the impending digital revolution. You need to welcome 'Digital Transformation'. For many organizations, this means adopting agile practices across the board.

Growth: Digital technologies are opening up markets to disruptive new entrants. To many, this may present a threat to their business but enterprises can also look at it as a chance to present new offerings, engage new customers, and expand their markets

Customer Engagement: In the current scenario, your customers are more likely to contact you via a mobile app or your website than in person. Also their demands on your digital performance are extremely high. Needless to say in the digital era, your brand is represented by your app and /or website. You risk your customers abandoning your brand if they receive an unsatisfactory digital experience. Enterprises who have invested in great user experiences aided by digital technologies, their digital transformation efforts are having a positive impact on customer engagement

How Technology enables 'Digital Transformation' – A Roadmap
Now that you acknowledge the importance of technology in your Digital Transformation journey, what should be the next step? How can you make transformation work for your business? How do you develop strategies to exploit the underlying technologies and practices that are so effective at improving business performance?

There are few critical steps to ensure successful digital transformation. The more you embrace and embed these across your organization, the greater the impact your digital transformation initiatives will have.

Digital Vision & Strategy: Refreshing your web presence, app, and customer analytics is an important step, but that’s not all. Becoming a digital enterprise means redefining your value proposition, competitive positioning, and operating model for the app economy.

Skilled Talent: The right people and skills are vital to digital success including a leadership team capable of creating a digital enterprise and technical experts to design critical digital business systems.

Embrace Agile Methodologies & Practices: Implement agile methodologies and practices across the entire organization, not just among your development teams. Being agile allows you to sense and react to change quickly with confidence.

Use DevOps: Integrate DevOps into your IT culture. Research shows that the more broadly you implement it, and the more deeply you embed it, the greater the business impact.

Deploy Advanced Technologies, Automation, Big Data, IoT & AI enabled by the application of digital technologies could transform your business operations, customer engagement, and improve productivity.

Identity/Analytics Based Security: Use of context, identity based security, behavioral analytic, and more predictive security approaches can help significantly impact your business operations.

It is important to recognize that the essence of a true digital transformation strategy lies in its objectives and scope. In more experienced organizations, digital strategies are more focused and developed on transforming the business. As a whole, digital transformation is a large undertaking. There is no denying that. However, if a digital strategy is properly implemented, then it will lead to the business being more aligned with their customer needs and expectations as well as being ahead of the digital future.