Why Digital Transformation is Critical to Business Growth

Transcript

Software Strategy Podcast

Welcome to our Software strategy podcast. We are here today to talk about digital transformation. I am joined by our CEO, Nigel King. Nigel, the term digital transformation seems to as it could have applied many times in the past. What does it actually mean and why is it relevant now?

Nigel King

Those are great questions. As you pointed out, it could have applied many times in the past. We've been transforming businesses over the last 50, 60 years to make them more and more and more digital, putting more and more of their operations onto a digital platform. And really that's what digital transformation means. I think it has become more urgent because the amount of space in the economy for a non digitally transformed business has become much smaller. And that's why it's become incredibly important right now. I suppose the market has decomposed that problem of digital transformation to mean three things. One of them is around automation, one of them is around analytics and one of them is around information security. Obviously, as more of your business becomes dependent upon information assets, the security of those information assets becomes very important.

Software Strategy Podcast

And why would you say automation is especially important now?

Nigel King

Obviously, automation has been moving ever since computers have been taken into the workplace It does move on a sort of pendulum. When I was first in the workplace, business processes that were automated were done on mainframes. And as I entered the workplace, that was when personal computers started to enter the workplace and things began to fragment. You had more and more of the processes of the enterprise started to become digitized, but they were done on smaller computing devices. The next wave really swept all of that back into an enterprise resource planning system. I think what we're seeing now is many services are being offered in the cloud by people that can specialize in particular business processes, and those are being offered at a departmental level. So the interdepartmental processes themselves have become more fragmented again. And there's a big wave of automation that's tying those fragments into an overall business process for not just one enterprise, but many enterprises that are part of an overall value chain. The business models that are delivering this value are adapting rapidly, in ways that enterprise systems do not yet embed.

And that's really the wave of process automation that I'm seeing in the market at the moment.

Software Strategy Podcast

Likewise, what is different about analytics now in the analytics space?

Nigel King

As we've moved more of the footprint of the enterprise to become digitized, it's just created much more data that we can take advantage of. I suppose it hasn't really been entirely evident how you would take advantage of it, though. When we first built analytic applications, it seemed to be fundamental that you had to ask what are the business questions that senior middle managers ask every day Such that you can create some answer to that question in some digitized form and present it back on some kind of dashboard. So there's still a lot of work to do in that space. The more of that data has become available to us. There may have been some of that data that we may have to have made assumptions about in the past that we can now replace with real data. So the footprint of data is becoming bigger. The reason that we present analytics is to take actions, and those actions have outcomes that can be fed back into the analytical problem itself. We call this machine learning, Where the machine starts to learn how well we've responded and can tune the response.

Nigel King

So we've gone through analytics and machine learning, and I suppose at the real, fashionable end of that problem, we really call that artificial intelligence, where there may be questions that we might not have formulated, that a machine can actually formulate for us. The answers that such systems produce might be difficult for a human being to interpret. Nonetheless, the data has revealed such answers to us and that's right at the most automated end of our analytics problem.

Software Strategy Podcast

And what would you say that the difference in information security now is?

Nigel King

Well, fundamentally, there's much more of your businesses now really dependent on those information assets, in terms of the Confidentiality; making sure that you don't have inappropriate access to those information assets as well as their Integrity; just making sure that the changes to that data are appropriate and Availability to make sure that those information assets are available to you when you are actually in need of them within the business. What is different more recently is that people have started to understand the notion of the information supply chain; that I'm only as secure as other participants in my information supply chain, Both those who upon whose information I rely as well as those who I give information to within my information supply chain.

Software Strategy Podcast

And what should companies do in response to these digital transformation needs?

Nigel King

So I suppose first thing, you have to really assess where you are, Where you are as an enterprise, and where you are within the economy that is really transforming. There may be business models evolving that expose you to a new set of competitors? There may be new data available to you that would allow you to make better decisions faster. And to make sure that you have a plan to take advantage of these capabilities within the marketplace Such that you could transform your business and participate in a digitally transformed economy.

Software Strategy Podcast

Of course, if you would like help in that assessment and formulating your plan, we have a range of services to assist you. We highlight these in the white paper that accompanies this interview.

Thank you very much, Nigel and this brings us to the end of our podcast. Thank you.