When every enterprise is already digitally transformed, what will it take for each organization to differentiate, innovate and disrupt playing fields?
As enterprises continue to innovate and modernize in a digital-centric world, many organizations now realize that digitalization alone will not be a differentiator across sectors.
Instead, organizations will need to focus on competitive differentiation: innovating at speed and scale; accelerating speed-to-market; and enhancing the customer experience and quality of service.
Technology will continue to provide a backbone to this innovation. Organizations will need to go beyond simply digitalizing their processes and pursue strategic transformation with modern IT architectures, including hybrid multi-cloud and a mix of technologies for cyber resilience and business intelligence.
Other than achieving competitive differentiation, organizations and enterprises will also need to be proactive in deriving valuable insights in a data-driven world, supported by investments in automation and shifts in skillsets.
Focusing on three core priorities
This year, as more businesses leverage automation for manual processes; leverage AI and ML to process data for insights and automation, and free employees to focus on driving what is truly important—innovation—the demand for skilled tech talent both locally and across the region will surge even further.
Encouraging innovation and knowledge-sharing at the grassroots level will be critical to nurture next-gen ‘techn-preneurs’, data scientists and skilled IT leaders. This will simplify and lower the barriers to innovation, and democratize technology across every enterprise.
On top of competitive differentiation and proactive pursuit of data-driven intelligence, the third core priority will be to maximize agility and scalability. As businesses shift away from long-term capital projects towards consumption-based subscription models, agility and scalability will be crucial for business leaders to pivot their operations as necessary.
For that to happen, organizations should avoid being bound to any one vendor once all IT environments and systems have been migrated to the cloud. Instead, they can embrace the flexibility of subscription-based consumption models, which deliver resources as needed, enabling them to adapt and scale according to market demands, whilst eliminating any wastage of resources in the process.
Evolving role of C-suites
As the lines between business and technology functions blur, another area that is evolving is the role of C-level executives.
Since leadership roles will inevitably converge in parallel with business and technology strategies, siloed C-suite roles will become even more a thing of the past.
Over the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have been faced with more tech-driven choices to make than ever before: from understanding how technology works, to how it can best support their organizational goals.
The requirement for future leaders is clear—beyond being agile and skilled in designing business strategies, they will also need to think strategically about technology. They will be expected to foster a culture of transformation, driven by continual innovation and disruption.
Beyond investing in IT infrastructure, C-suites need to encourage healthy competition and a hunger for innovation across all levels of the organization in order to succeed.
