Digital transformation explained and why it’s a “must-have” for companies
Digital transformation involves modernising a company’s use of technology to enhance interactions with customers, partners, and employees. It varies across companies and sectors, driven by the rise of digital-first businesses like Uber and Airbnb. Accelerated by the pandemic, it focuses on technology integration to improve efficiency, competitiveness, and customer experiences, and is seen across industries from banking to government services.
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Jeremy Gleeson: So, digital transformation. This is quite a broad, catch-all phrase that references a company’s desire to adopt modern technology to improve its agility in how it engages with its customers, partners, and employees.
So, a digital transformation can take the form of a variety of different aspects or evolutions. Therefore, it can mean different things to different companies. It’s an investment opportunity that we’ve been aware of since the mid part of the last decade, but it really started to get a lot of attention in 2020, due to the outbreak of Covid and the impact it had on companies who needed to enable their employees to work from home and engage with customers in a virtual environment.
One of the initial catalysts for digital transformation was the emergence of successful Digital-First businesses – companies that did most, if not all, of their business via a website or a mobile application. I’m thinking of companies such as Uber [Technologies, Inc.] and Airbnb [, Inc.] and Revolut [Ltd.]. These businesses were growing, they were attracting business from younger generations, and they were also attracting employees as well from more established businesses. So, the older, more established businesses were noting this and needed to make the appropriate changes to their own businesses in order to not lose market share or even employees to these nimbler, digital native businesses.
So, digital transformation is the process by which companies embed technology across their businesses to drive benefits such as improves efficiency and increased business dynamics, ultimately adopting a Digital-First mindset as they compete for customers and employees against digital native businesses. The results can be seen across a variety of industries, such as retail banking, where the provision of a mobile banking app is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, but a ‘must-have’ if you want to be able to attract the next generation of customers.
Governments around the world are also seeing the benefits of introducing digital-based self-services processes for a variety of tasks that were once paper-based and highly manual. Thinking about applying for a passport today, which you can do completely online and digitally, and happens much more faster and efficiently than it historically used to take place.
So, once again, a variety of different areas which have been touched upon by companies across the world and will drive growth for companies that are providing the software and solutions [for] many years to come.
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