The Growing Requirement for Digital Business

Craig Powers , Research Director, Worldwide Digital Business Strategies at 国际数据公司 , shows how digital business makes a company more resilient and how to build the right digital platform.

The imperative to become a digital-first business has never been more apparent than it is in 2023. Through the disruptive forces of the last three years, it has been those organizations with digital foundations that have been able to adapt and thrive in difficult times. #Digitalization built resilience for businesses. On the back of pandemic and The Great Resignation that emphasized the need for digital, there are storms of disruption gathering in 2023 around looming recession, inflation, growing skills gaps, war, and supply chain restraints.??

It will once again be those that embrace digital business that will be resilient enough to weather storms of disruption and have the technology and processes in place to build new revenue streams and accelerate digital revenue.?

Those that are already behind digitally need to be looking to catch up, because organizations that are already digitally mature have realized the value of their investments, and they are looking to maintain or even increase those investments.

Digital spending is expected to grow while other areas of technology spending stagnate, and that is bringing us into the Digital Business Era.

Why are digitally mature organizations more likely to maintain or increase digital and technology investments in the face of disruption? They understand that digital builds the resilience needed to weather the storms.??

Building Digital Business??

What is most challenging in running a digital business is typically influenced by where an organization is on its digital journey. Those that are digital frontrunners see the key challenges to running a digital business most often as mitigating risks that threaten digital trust and creating new leading metrics.???

Organizations that are not digital and trying to become digital struggle with building data-driven businesses and cultures, and building cultures where continuous improvement is the focus. They also are finding it difficult to get the right digital talent—which can stem from not having the digital systems in place to attract those with digital skills.?

How do those lagging digitally reach the point where they are less worried about culture and talent, and focused more on solving business problems around risk and data??

?One of the key characteristics of digital organizations is top-down support for digital endeavors. The CEO and the C-Suite must be driving digital business and be promoting the use of emerging technologies to build out a digital business platform and reach digital goals.?

With top-down support, companies can make digital business a reality. In the process, businesses will establish new organizational fabrics, assessing and reimagining their processes for greater efficiency and new opportunities. Digital businesses will take on an ecosystem mindset, looking beyond their own walls to find solutions across their partners and industry, with even some digital organizations going beyond their own industry to seek out revenue streams.??

The Digital Business Platform?

Implementing emerging technologies help modernize IT foundations, and that base enables companies to build and adopt the technology that helps them first build resilience and propel growth.

Digital business platforms should be built with five design principles in mind: experience-led, intelligent, modular/cloud-driven, automated, and trusted.?

Technologies that help establish foundational IT for Digital Business Platform include network and connectivity, integration tools, microservices, multi-cloud services, platform services, artificial intelligence and machines learnings, APIs, programmable infrastructure, data systems, operational technology, automation, and security.??

With this foundation, companies can bring digital business models, organizational models, and operating models to life via tech to build resilience and tech to accelerate.??

Tech that builds resilience helps give companies better insight into their core operations and includes, but is not limited to, intelligent fraud detecting, supply chain contingency planning, automated employee onboarding, and customer churn analysist. Tech that accelerates is about establishing new revenue sources and looking to the future with API sales, data monetization, adaptive workforce planning, intelligence mergers and acquisitions modeling, and more.??

Establishing this integrated, enterprise-wide platform that supports digitally-driven businesses is still a differentiator across industries—just 15% of organizations indicate having done this. That means there is an opportunity for organizations to embrace digital business not only to keep up, but to surpass their competition.???

The Importance of Partnership??

If an organization is struggling to get off the ground digitally, it is often lacking the in-house expertise around the culture, processes, and technology platform necessary to build digital business. That's where the right partnerships become essential.

The right digital partners should complement and enhance a company's ability to become digital and accelerate digital revenue.??

One such path to find both the right technologies and partnerships is with Siemens Xcelerator , which is built on three pillars of a curated, digital-focused Siemens and partner technology portfolio, a powerful partner ecosystem, and an evolving marketplace for customers, partners, and developers to help fill the gaps of current technology when it comes to specific organizational requirements.??