As we embark on 2022, we are riddled with an equal amount of hope and anxiety – hope to shape a collaborative and closely-knit business ecosystem and anxiety to deliver on future promises. Let us retrospect on the journey businesses have had so far to align internal operation management with the external customer ecosystem.

Digital transformation is a universal necessity today. According to Statista, the projected spending on digital transformation technologies and services worldwide is expected to reach $2.8 trillion by 2025. Hence, it comes as no surprise that businesses are actively investing in digital initiatives these days. Enterprises that were working on state-of-the-art transaction management systems have now moved towards aggregating and warehousing their data. However, the tangible benefits are yet to be realized. The difference lies in walking the technology talk. Organizations seldom focus on the adoption of knowledge discovery. And embedding that knowledge into transaction management systems still remains a far-fetched reality for many.

Gravitate towards technology adoption and a mindset change

Technologies are advancing as we speak. From catering to distributed domain-driven data management for micro-level knowledge discovery to managing process requirements, eliminating information barriers across clouds, and advanced data science capabilities as a service. Technological advancements have transcended boundaries but the challenge lies in the adoption front. The absorption of technology to re-engineer and reimagine processes digitally to build cognitively intelligent operations is yet to pick up pace. Enterprises investing a fortune in their data transformation initiatives, unfortunately, end up creating multiple data tombs owing to the disconnect between intelligence (knowledge) needs and data needs. For example, ‘Farm to fork’ as a process has its own positive and negative impacts on either side. The signals and attributes on the fork (customer) will have a direct impact on the farm (product) front and vice versa. Unless sub-processes and a process in its entirety are reimagined together, the knowledge requirement definition and the associated data modeling will not be complete, and it will result in creating more and more data tombs without any purpose.

Attaining organizational maturity requires synchronizing technology adoption with real-time data.  While we are helping many of our customers evolve towards the vision of real-time enterprises through the rollout of programs and initiatives such as Data-as-a-Product to cater across processes for delivering a customer-centric experience, hurtling into the future needs a time travel synchronization of technology evolution journey and its adoption journey. 

One of the main reasons for the widening gap between evolution and adoption is the confinement of the thought process and the leadership outlook towards a legacy setup and the as-is process models defined within the ecosystem. A conscious effort is required to change the existing mindset to look at the bigger picture. Clichéd definition and meta characterization of a customer is futile when customers are expecting a real-time delivery experience that goes beyond any product or service that is being consumed. While the digital backbone empowers the globalization of a business in its true sense, the new order of living demands a more localized and personalized experience.

So far, globalized and centralized process modeling and transformation initiatives defined within those process models were working optimally as they were not glaringly exposing the experience delivery gaps. Evolving customer expectations have enforced lifestyle transformations without clarity around human touchpoint-based physical interactions. It is about time that enterprises accelerate the knowledge and intelligence-driven process transformations by synchronizing the time travel journey of technology evolution and its subsequent adoption. It is imperative for us to be customer-centric in our approach as we continue to thrive in the new normal.

Path forward

As we open ourselves to future promises, it is crucial that we inject our business ecosystem with domain experience, data-centric insights, outcome-oriented initiatives, and agile setup to unlock the potential of digital transformation. Only then can we realize the knowledge-embedded real-time transformation of process models and business models with a singular focus on improving customer experience to achieve faster technology adoption in this new year.