Dear Readers, Thanks for landing here on my blog page.
This is my first blog. So, blog might contain some flaws, but I am trying my best putting things in shape as per my best knowledge and experience.
There are so many relevant topics around us, but I selected digitization or digital transformation topic intentionally because I am currently into this practice for quite sometime and helping customers in their digitization journey. So, I thought no topic could be better than this to go for, specifically looking at the relevance in today’s and future time to come.
Though there are so many blogs, articles are floating around on this topic. My blog is based on my real-life experience of this in the industry, I try to put my version very precise and crisp.
Without further ado, let's get started.
Understanding Industrial revolutions and the path to digitization and IT modernization
Let’s first understand the industrial revolutions as it directly related to digitization and modernization. We’re currently into fourth industrial revolution where digital transformation is one of the integral parts of it. Below diagram depicts the journey to the 4th IR. All previous industrial revolutions made the foundation for the 4th. Here industrial revolution applies across all kinds of industries including IT.
Below diagram show how these two stacked up.
It looks like as below path it follows.
The fourth Industrial Revolution comes in the form of Digital Transformation – following similar disruptions by the introduction of the steam engine, electricity, and the micro-processor. Characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres, this new era will create new services that link people together and enable them to do more.
The digital world is advancing at an amazing speed - and it’s constantly changing. To succeed, industries must embrace a digital transformation and take on board new ways of connecting people, data, and processes to create value for customers. Encompassing technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing and autonomous vehicles, it is moving at breakneck speed and disrupting all areas of our lives, socially, politically and economically. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is disrupting almost every organization, industry and roles in every country and creating massive change in a non-linear way at unprecedented speed.
Now Let’s understand about digitization and modernization
Digitization: Digitization or Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. The term is widely used in public-sector organizations to refer to modest initiatives such as putting services online or legacy modernization. Thus, the term is more like “digitization” than “digital business transformation.”
Digital business places pressure on all organizations as new business models, products, and services disrupt existing industries and create entirely new markets and competition.
IT modernization: It is a business transformation stage where industries are upgrading their legacy or pre-modern applications to a modern application using latest tools and technologies.
What are the driving factors of digitization i.e. Why we came to this situation?
New technologies emerged rapidly in recent years and landed to this situation are as listed below
Connecting and computing – easy availability of high-speed internet, more efficient, inexpensive and smaller integrated circuits
Mobile and smart devices – rise and growth of smartphones and tablets, Flexible displays
Mobility – rise of electric vehicles, drones
Other technologies - Artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, cloud computing, big data, Quantum computing, Virtual reality (VR), Biotechnology, Robotics, 3D printing, IoT.
Above factors gave birth to the need of better customer experience, agility, quick product/services delivery to the market, rise of startup & increase of market competitiveness, rapid technology change/shift, short span of market/business opportunity, faster IT/application deployment process, moving business to cloud due to globalization needs as spread across the globe.
Digitization and IT modernization use latest technologies such AI/ML/DL, RPA, All Big data tools, distributed and multi-cloud environment and platforms, microservices, containerization, cloud native platform like Kubernetes, OpenShift, DevOps etc.
Hence digitization and modernization has become one of the necessary requirements in today’s and future business and technology.
Why this is inevitable?
Digitization and IT modernization are inevitable because of below reasons
To support 4th industrial revolution
To harnessing the market as quickly as possible by going to marked very quickly why because in modern era things are changing very rapidly and opportunities are available for short span of time due to online systems.
To get competitive advantage
To give better customer experience
To be future-ready business
Unlocking big data opportunities
Better performance and reliability.
Conclusion:
To live up to the demands of the new digital transformation economy, organizations have to cease relying on outdated software and modernize their core technologies. Enterprises will benefit only when they stop seeing modernization as a one-time project and embrace it as a cycle.
Digitization is one of the must do requirement for any industries existing in this modern era to become future ready, compete in the dynamic business environments and to provide better customer experience. All industries must invest a big portion of their budget on this transformation despite many challenges and risks.
The bottom line is, no industry can survive in today’s fast, constant changing and competitive market environments without having digital transformation.
There are so many challenges and risks in the journey of digital transformation. There are certain guidelines, methods, techniques, checklist and best practices available to make this journey successful which I will cover very soon in the subsequent topic “Digital transformation – how to make it successful”.
Reference: My real-life experience, Gartner, IBM, Forrester, International Data, Evalueserve, Nielsen, Alliance Data, Constellation Research publish reports, articles, webinars etc.
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