We know the world is dying to wrap up 2020 and forgive it for the tremendous losses its people and businesses continue to suffer. But while businesses continue to finish their year-end chores to be ready to welcome 2021, here are the top digital transformation trends relevant to global startups and enterprises for 2021.
Think of Omni-Channel Customer Experience
Prioritizing customer experience will never cease to be the no.1 of digital transformation trends. Businesses that are not ready to enhance customer experience through improved digital engagement are sure to fall behind. The millennial consumer base is interested in an immersive experience in which half-hearted digital efforts will lead to no ultimate success. So, while there’s still time, sit with your product team to review your digital presence, your website optimized for mobile devices, social media communication, online reviews, etc. Evaluate the need for an app to make your brand more accessible and listening.
Take Data Privacy Seriously
India and other Asian countries are far from honoring data privacy or laws governing handling customer data. The European Union in 2017 came out with GDPR that regulates how businesses use customer data. They have implemented and mandated compliance of GDPR across businesses operating within the EU or inbound and outbound EU. In India, we don’t even know who created Arogya Setu as the Government of India’s Facebook account promotes the app to track, monitor, and alert Covid-19 impact. Opening one’s email in the morning is to unlock a barrage of emails from banks and e-commerce businesses. In this context, businesses outside the EU must focus on customer privacy by honoring their communication preferences and abstaining from reselling customer data.
Tap into Application Programming Interfaces
For full-scale digital transformation, think cloud and cloud services. Faced with the unpredicted Covid-19, only businesses that already adopted cloud services could defray the loss to a great extent over businesses that couldn’t afford or hesitated to adopt cloud services. To leverage this aspect, businesses should focus on building Application Programming Interfaces or APIs to decentralize data through collaboration. Well-strategized APIs can help gather data from various platforms on a single portal to help the C-Suite make revenue-impacting decisions geared toward a company’s annual objective.
Hyperautomation of the Manual & Intelligent Data Processing
Haven’t you heard of Hyperautomation yet? Simply put, it is a collective of technologies like Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Process Mining to automate redundancies for more productive and time-saving output. It will be tough for businesses that are yet to automate their processes and invite themselves to the party of “digital-first reminds me of the skip-tracing department in Bank of America that got fully automated as anticipated. 70% of global commercial organizations are working on hyper-automation as it is the reality forward. SMBs must not delay automating their manual processes sooner before the industry is ready for the next innovation. Notwithstanding, automation is also to harness the power of data in business intelligence.
Quantum Computing for Digital Transformation
You are familiar with quantum physics, but quantum computing trending as a digital transformation technology is futuristic. Spurred by partnerships of Splunk and Quantum Computing Inc, Honeywell and Microsoft, and AWS and IonQ, quantum computing’s growth has registered an excellent level of industrial acceptance. What a traditional computer takes ages to process, quantum computing breaks it within record time, as in the case with the discovery of the coronavirus vaccination. Whether it is in business intelligence, scientific discovery, or logistics, industries are exploring the offerings of quantum computing to query, monitor, analyze, and act on data at scale, from any source at any time.
Cybersecurity Mesh to Govern & Control Cloud Data
With work from home, the new global norm, cybersecurity has moved to a higher vulnerability plane. Securing access to a company’s digital assets is more crucial than before. In this context, Gartner talks about “Cybersecurity Mesh,” “a distributed architectural approach to scalable, flexible, and reliable cybersecurity control.” Source. Organizations in 2021 can’t move a pin without consulting their cybersecurity experts, as Covid-19 has catapulted an enormous leap toward a future that is under the radar of threats for ransomware. Therefore, it goes without emphasizing the need for businesses to evolve to leverage the cybersecurity mesh to the utmost protection of their cloud data.
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