HOW TO DRAFT A SUCCESS-DRIVEN DIGITAL STRATEGY

The global tech spend towards Digital Experience (DX) is expected to touch $2.3 trillion in 2023, accounting for 53% of investments on Information and Communications Technology (ICT). This speaks volumes about how CIOs, CDOs and CTOs across industry verticals are perceiving the current trends of going digital to meet strategic business objectives.

Businesses born in digital age use new, innovative and cutting-edge digital technology to generate higher value, expedite creation of new revenue streams, achieve better organizational efficiency, reinforce bottom line, and improve customer satisfaction score. Importantly, they are also more agile and resilient compared to their traditional counterparts. For any organization seeking to ‘become digital’, they can achieve the digital ambition by collaborating with the right DX partner for leveraging the most-suitable digital technologies. It is important to remember that the key to a successful digital transformation is an incremental approach with well-defined success-criteria.

Drafting a success-driven DX strategy

Currently, businesses across domains are grappling with a multitude of questions pertaining to their DX strategy – including how to begin their DX journey, whether it should be domain-specific, done all-at-once or in a phase-driven way? Let us explore the critical aspects that one must keep in mind to draft a successful DX strategy.

Outlining the business objectives

The first step to any DX Strategy definition is to call out the objectives of the two most important stakeholders i.e. Customers and Shareholders. DX Strategy is not only an enabler but an extremely critical driver to the business strategy to be able to stay competitive and profitable in the ever-evolving business dynamics. We need to start with the voice of customers, shareholders and business to understand and prioritize the critical business needs. It could be to try creating new customer segments or increase the wallet share, launch new products and services, change the business model and/or operating model across the value chain, expand to newer geographies or have a differentiated talent strategy. Based on the most common voice across customers, shareholders and business, prioritize the business objectives to draft an aligned DX Strategy.

Aligning the DX strategy to the business objectives

For a DX Strategy to be successful, it must be aligned to the prioritized business objectives. There are generally two major tracks we have within the DX Strategic Framework. The first one is Digital Transformation (DXT) and the other one is Digital Optimization (DXO). Where the business needs points towards some radical improvements impacting the Top-Line, the track is referred as DXT and where it is about impacting the mid-line and the current ways of working, the track is referred as DXO.

Whilst, both DXT and DXO tracks have a common theme to create a positive bottom-line impact, the way these two tracks are outlined and executed are quite distinct. The components in DXT track (primarily Process, People and Technology Components) enable Businesses to generate higher value through business-defined initiatives like new product launches, geographical expansions, customer expansion and outreach, to name a few. Scalability and Agility of the Digital Architecture are the most important tenets of this track.

The components in DXO on the other hand enable the businesses to continuously improve the current ways of working through higher efficiency (doing more with less), enhanced customer experience, higher accuracy of the processes, streamlined processes, lower downtime, etc. Adaptability, Availability and Reliability of the Digital Architecture are the most important tenets of this track.

Evolving the digital architecture

To achieve the new-age DX Strategy, we are required to demystify the “Low-Code” frameworks and the code-intensive alternative of developing complete application, or, High-Code. The low code frameworks enable consumption of powerful AI/ML capabilities with a very little effort.

Since technology and digital capabilities are key to make an organization grow and remain competitive and profitable, it is extremely important that the organization adopts a Digital Architecture that operates all the “High-Code” as well as “Low-Code” deployment processes with agility, efficiency and accuracy. What this essentially means that all the new business initiatives that require a high digital-intervention will move from the conventional Software Development Lifecycles to more agile and new-age frameworks involving use of containerization, Kubernetes, Microservices and high-end digital value-chains. These technologies collectively form the “High-Code” deployment strategy.

On the other hand, all important business efficiency and process improvement programs that require incremental developments form the “Low-Code” deployment strategy. Many of the new-age automation technologies like RPA, Cognitive Automation, Modern App development, Chatbot, Conversational Automation, Intelligent Mobile/Web App Development, Integrations, Simple Value Chains/Digital-BPMs are a part of the Low-Code Architecture. These components and deployments are not as complex as the High-Code deployment frameworks.

High-Code digital transformation (DXT) track

The world’s largest digital intensive organizations who are always the pioneers in creating transformational customer experience have done that by continually evolving their products and services. At an average, all the leading Global Digital giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. have a new product or a new product feature or a service offered, almost every month. The key to keep the customer excited about their products and services, is the speed at which they can launch, their services. Not only the giants, but all other Fortune 500 companies have started to Digitally Transform using the high-code deployment components like containers, Kubernetes, etc. 

Kubernetes and containerization play a very important role for high speed of delivery. In an era where device or platform-agnostic solutions are the biggest hits, containerization is a natural fit. Simplified deployment across multiple environments makes it a perfect choice for developers as it facilitates easier management of libraries and application dependent processes. Debugging, testing, and rollbacks are some of the other advantages that will make out a case for containerization. However, it comes with the challenge of managing various containers, versions, and standards.

Herein, Kubernetes plays a significant role in simplifying the task of deployment and management. Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system that large-scale cloud providers and tech giants adopt to ease the move to containerization. Kubernetes offers a cloud agnostic deployment option, a powerful capability.

The service providers in this space are offering Capex as well as Opex models to their customers. The containers and Kubernetes technologies are also offered “as a service” to enable the Digital-Native players to get an even greater ROI.

Low-Code digital optimization (DXO) track

Whilst the Businesses thrive on facing the competition plus growing their businesses by being agile and scalable, they also need to be adaptable to continuously improve their internal ways of working. These objectives are met through the Digital Optimization (DXO) track using the Low-Code Digital Strategy. The focus of Digital Optimization can be easily referred to, as the 3 Es- Experience, Effectiveness and Efficiency.

The Low-Code strategy works on some already evolved models to perform incremental digital initiatives and covers both SDLC or agile methodologies to deploy conventional or the new-age automations. The service providers in this space are also providing readily available “Business Processes” in a box or “Business Process as a Service” (BPaaS) for faster and cost-efficient business outcomes. As an example to explain the above concept, an RPA or Intelligent Automation product can be customized for an organization and created bottom-up or could be built as components (RPA bots for email-reading, RPA bots for data processing, etc. can be picked-up off-the-shelf and connected on an open-source platform) or could be simply used as a service on a “pay as you go” model. The power of automation, combined with the cloud, makes BPaaS more optimized and consistent in meeting business objectives. Its advantages include the ability to handle repetitive processes through automation, multiple deployment environments, and massive scaling. At the same time, the subscription/consumption-based models on offer make it a cost-effective model. Additionally, it dispenses with the need for dedicated manpower for clients, with multi-tenancy splitting the costs, without any impact on the quality of human processes involved in the service.

And finally, successfully implementing the DX strategy

Whilst most of the Organizations who have envisioned Digital Experience for their customer-facing and business processes, would have successfully created a DX Strategy, but only a handful are able to implement them successfully.

This is due to multiple factors but could be due to some of the following causes:

1. Lack of visibility or a lack of a common understanding across the value-chain of DX implementation i.e. a silo'ed approach towards implementation

2. Scope creep and Time Over-runs during the process of implementation

3. Higher cost investment in the beginning leading to frequent cost-over runs and lower control on project economics

4. Higher time to market leading to risk of changed business priorities ultimately leading to poor RoI and very importantly poor employee motivation

Although, digital transformation has become a catch-all phrase, but only those organizations who apply the best-suited business technology models reap the true benefits. Behind the success of the transformation lies a convergence of technologies and cloud infrastructure. We, at Sify, help businesses achieve digital ambition by offering a comprehensive range of digital services, empowered with cloud-native cutting-edge technologies, leading to a high RoI, low time to market, better control of the costs and timelines, improved visibility of potential business risks and ultimately leading to high morale of all stakeholders, be it Customers, Shareholders, Partners, Vendors and very importantly, the employees.

Our expertise into Cloud-Native Value Chain, Kubernetes, Containers, and Micro-Services added with the new-age exponential technologies can help the organizations achieve their prioritized business objectives with utmost competence. Our digital solutions enable you to re-imagine your business model, respond faster to changing environments, generate new revenue streams, and future-proof the success of your business.

Interested to know more? Reach-out to us!

Ashish Bhagat

Head-Digital Services

Sify Technologies Ltd

+91 9971150135

[email protected]