The road to modernisation is a critical one, and businesses embarking on this journey will need to consider how each aspect of their business can be optimised to fulfil new growth potential and digital objectives, as Sven Hammer, co-founder of Apica, explains…
Automation is a key driver for digital transformation, enabling organisations to optimise their existing processes and keep pace with the competition. So what role does automation have to play in digital transformation?
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation harnesses the greater use of technology within an organisations products, services and processes to increase speed of execution, deliver competitive differentiation, and ultimately improve the user experience of its customers.
There are four aspects to digital transformation:
1. From the outside looking in: How your digital transformation project appears to external customers, and how your organisation is viewed via the internet
2. The inside perspective: How digital transformation affects your employees and processes
3. The digital transformation business model: The overall, high level transformation plan – the ‘Uberisation’ of organisations, if you like
4. The cultural impact of digital transformation: The day-to-day realities of organisational change when you are competing with ‘born digital’ companies. How do you attract staff that could pick Google as an employer, for example? How do you transform your existing company culture to a more agile, digital workplace?
The role of automation in transforming businesses
For organisations looking to digitise, the pace of deployment and interaction is a cause for concern. IT teams need to move away from working in isolation to a more collaborative approach which will make it easier to visualise the whole picture and improve agility.
Aligning IT and business objectives is of paramount importance, thanks to increasing market demand for more and more frequent releases of products and services. These releases pose a challenge for the IT team, which is constantly trying to push out new, high quality and secure releases as fast as possible to remain agile and competitive. Organisations are forced to turn to automation to meet this demand.
There are three key drivers for digital transformation outside of the business proposition; increased employee productivity, overall IT operational efficiency and business process optimisation. Automation can help to achieve all three of these objectives.
Increased employee productivity
By taking on the repetitive, rules-based tasks, automation frees up employees to focus on more productive, value-add tasks. Many organisations face difficulty with resourcing ahead of their digital transformation projects, so automation offers a cost-effective solution to this problem.
Improved overall IT operational efficiency
Automation eliminates the prospect of human error and delivers outcomes that are 100% accurate, every time. With automation, tasks can also be completed much quicker, reducing the overall process cycle. Active Digital Experience Monitoring can be used to verify uptime and find root causes quicker, making it a must have technology to stay proactive in your IT investments.
Optimised business processes
Many traditional companies embarking on a journey towards digital transformation are making a move away from legacy systems in order to optimise their processes. Automation is IT system and process agnostic, allowing organisations to adopt and build on this technology within the existing environment.
Organisations working towards a transformative environment must integrate automation into their existing processes. Speed and quality is increasing and an organisation’s ability to deliver this versus customer demand will now dictate how well they can compete. Ultimately the ability to release products more quickly and transform the business will result in revenue and profit growth. Automation will be at the heart of a business’s ability to deliver this.
For more details, please visit www.apicasystem.com
