Digital Transformation - a Journey with Automation, Tools, Processes, Cloud, Containers technologies.
Customer expectations changing and continue to rise, workplace changing constantly, changing business landscapes, Business wants focus on business results, innovation, and continuous improvements. To address above concerns it is critical for organizations to equip themselves with automations, Agile, Leans processes, use of update innovative tools, use of cloud technologies to products.
Digital transformation is fundamentally changing or upgrading business with the integration of digital technology to become more agile, improve, innovate and accelerate Business deliverables, trust and add value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that organizations needs to go through to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.
Digital transformation requires development transformation, so you can start at home, by modernizing the way you develop and deliver software.
Creating software applications, building IT infrastructure, and rolling out business processes is not new
But exponential technological growth does have an origin story. It began with infrastructure, which became the foundation for applications that redefined business processes. And in that way, everything is connected: The infrastructure determined what kinds of apps were used, which determined what kinds of processes worked best.
Automation
Many a time Automation is used for Digital Transformation ,but Automation involves applying technology to make processes run themselves, making those processes more efficient and increasing transparency, monitoring and reporting capabilities. In short, automation is one of the end goal of digital transformation.
Process Automation
Process Automantion is a one of key necessary step towards digital transformation.
Automating day-to-day workflows lies at the heart of successful digital transformation.Implementing and socializing automation across the entire business means that entire teams benefit from newly efficient workflow, not just IT.
For instance below few key processes we may want to consider for automating to drive your organization towards digital transformation.
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems helps organizations to stay competitive by keeping up with customer’s increasingly high expectations and advanced requirements, needs of customers, automate tasks, shorten sales cycles, and increase retention.
- Project management – Being Vital part of organization, empowering project management team with right and widely adopted tools will help them faster time to market, greater efficiency. Widely used project management tools like Jira, confluence, share site etc. and you may want to make sure these tools integrate into overall digital workplace, considering your collaborative suite, intranet platform.
- Onboarding new employees, a new customers, new vendors, business partners, investors. Automating onboarding processes can have a profound impact on the ease and speed with which you’re able to bring them onboard and making a good first impression.
- Automating Human Resources, Finance, Payroll, Recruitment, Approval etc. processes which can significantly reduce manual intervention, help to go paperless. Evaluate best of breed digital tools can help to improve process and can play vital role in Business digital transformation.
Adopting Lean, Agile, DevOps processes and methodology
While practicing digital transformation, it’s very crucial to respond with fast pace to the business requirements changes, customer satisfaction.
Establish and adoption of Lean Agile culture in software development can help team to learn fast, increase productivity, iterate more often and work constantly on new project releases.
Additionally, adopting DevOps can allow your ops development team to work closely together, which enhances collaboration and reduces the time taken for release. This approach also enables your organization in adopting Digital Transformation practices, delivering a more pleasant experience.
DevOps brings close collaboration possible, where teams can work iteratively on components using a consistent set of tools and with code that can be migrated between teams and environments as needed.
Infrastructure - Cloud Technologies, Docker, Kubernetes Container Technologies
IT infrastructure is consistently being reshaped by the global Digital Transformation of business.
Mainframes led to servers, which led to networks, which led to cloud hosting, which led to today’s hybrid environments. With rapidly increasing need a place on internet for every organization has brought private cloud, public and hybrid cloud demands.
Now with Distributed, server less, event driven demands containerization which bring better performance, availability, scalability , portability from environment to another.
Containers and Kubernetes are part of the technology ecosystem enabling Digital Transformation.
Containerization helps to build rapid development ecosystem by build robust Build and release pipeline, makes development team quick container test environments locally, there is no need of test servers.
Applications: Modular Architecture
Application architecture is most critical and incredibly important, as it directly impacts the team’s ability to react to rapid change. A more loosely coupled, modular architecture puts the developer team in the best position to evolve quickly with fewer dependencies, enabling them to make updates and replace components over time to meet business objectives and customer demands.
Historically from Monolithic applications where we would new server for each application. This puts limitations of single server to serve Input, output, and processing and more cost to scalability as we need to have room for more servers if we wanted better performing applications.
N-Tier Application Architecture born to overcome monoliths problems which essentially breaks the functional pieces of the architecture up, allowing 1 server to handle the needs of more than 1 application. Using a client-server method, prestation , Business and database layers bring N-tier that brought serving requests from different layer which is running on single server.
Today with increasing demands of using multiple devices which forced business to revolve around Single App. This replaced n-tier applications by microservices, which break down apps into even smaller components.
Many integral business processes—logistics, manufacturing, research, development, management—depend on apps. The rise in applications’ business prevalence was first due to server’s market disruption and then to the evolution in application architecture.
Conclusion
Digital Transformation is a Journey, cultural shift, not a destination. Digital transformation is practice which helps organization to learn fast, be lean, Agile helping to do continuous delivery & keep up customer satisfaction by taking process-oriented approach.
Digital transformation efforts are ongoing and evolving, which can render traditional business value calculations and financial governance approaches less effective.
Being said that quantifying success is crucial to continued investment. Just implementing the technology isn’t enough – the technology needs to be specifically tied to monitoring key performance indicators on customer insights and business process effectiveness.
