Businesses need to rebuild their model with digital transformation

As the famous adage goes, necessity is the mother of invention; the Covid-19 pandemic is endowing new ways to disruptive innovation. 

Everyone is aware of the impact of the pandemic on the global economy. Not only enterprises, and medium scale businesses, small businesses as well as micro-enterprises realized the severe effect during the COVID-19 crisis. MSMEs are more vulnerable to this crisis due to fewer assets and limited resources, including cash reserves.

Most countries, including the united states, it has disrupted production, diminished demand for numerous goods and services, broken supply chains, and forced SMEs to suspend or scale down operations.

In the U.S., the world’s largest economy, more than 26 million jobs were lost over the last five weeks. The country’s unemployment rate of 4.4% in March was the highest since August 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to a BCG report, as of April 8, more than 90 percent of on-premise foodservice MSMEs in Colombia, 70 percent in Brazil, and 30 percent in Mexico have closed.

Realizing the crisis and challenges mentioned above, there’s an urgent need to reimagine how MSMEs will operate and build their business continuity plan to survive a major system outage.

Digital rebuild strategy - A pandemic recovery solution

Businesses have now started to change the way they operate during the pandemic crises. Those MSMEs who have not yet gained the advantage of technological disruption, it’s time for them to bring together their executive team and redesign their operating and selling models for a new realism.

Be prepared to reset the resources and work itself, the employer/employee relationship, and the business ecosystem. For rebuilding the business continuity strategy, each business will take its own path. Some may want to rebuild plans for specific areas; others could reduce or retire specific operations or reinvent themselves.

By now, most small businesses have led their models to digitize at least some portion of their primary operations to protect employees, uphold their brand value, and serve customers facing mobility restrictions due to the pandemic crisis.

“Digital has been a big priority for all our companies. Post-COVID, there will be an accelerated scaling of digital,” said Aarthi Subramanian, group chief digital officer, Tata Sons in a conversation with Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India during the first-ever virtual edition of Envision.

According to Ms. Subramanian, COVID-19 will accelerate the scaling of Digital across industries and investments in Cloud, AI, and cybersecurity. “Digital transformation in companies will focus on new end-to-end customer journeys, and we will see an increase in the adoption of automation in manufacturing industries. They will also invest in enhancing employee engagement, given the remote working model. Enterprises will build world-class digital infrastructure as a horizontal capability,” she said.

To digitally transform any small business, a collaborative approach is required - bringing together online platforms or tools that can offer digitally-enabled business opportunities, strategies for acquiring online users (SEO, ads, social media, e-newsletters), financial services to provide financial products to MSMEs, and training plan for employees to adopt the new platform, services, and tools.

Is digital transformation hard?

Yes, it is!! For traditional businesses, adapting all new transformational changes and redefining their model from scratch can be a challenging task. Most companies will require to try with some activities before fully adopting a “digital scenario.”

Four significant challenges involved in adopting digital transformation included the following --

●     Digital Strategy

●     Operational Effectiveness

●     Technical Capabilities

●     Innovation

However, every challenge is an opportunity, and digital transformation is no exception. So, businesses need to plan out the process and decide on the priorities strategically.

Senior leads need to ensure the workforce doesn’t revert to the old way of doing things when new activities are put in the picture.

Approaches towards digital transformation - renovation or rebuild?

Over the years, businesses are advised on or premeditated hundreds of digital transformation. When strategizing digital mindset, some businesses opt just to adapt minor fix-up strategies, some of them opt for substantial renovation for a few operations. In contrast, others decide to entirely redesign their business model to provide better services in the future.

Experts suggest, be careful how you organize and structure for experimentation, experts say. The goal should be to serve customers conveniently.

Whichever approach is considered – renovation or rebuild, they have their own set of opportunities and challenges. This is the duty of CIOs and CDOs to make sure that digital initiatives are properly planned, prioritized, and executed.

Moving to the cloud: A key to secure digital initiatives

Cloud computing is expected to grow from $67B in 2015 to $162B in 2020, securing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19%. (Source)

Cloud is considered to be a logical and optimal solution for digital transformation. With the powerful capabilities of cloud computing, organizations can take advantage of cost-effectiveness, agility, service quality, and all new and intelligent ways to view, analyze, and use the information. You can make sure that the mission-critical data is safe and secure.

Not only this, CHROs all expect cloud platforms to deliver value in employee engagement and experience. Applications built-in cloud are expected to be easy to use and intuitive, and hence increases the employee engagement rate and reduces the chances of resistance to change.

In marketing sectors, managers can lean in on better customer acquisition and retention rates. They can expect better ROI on online campaigns, promotions, and analytics. Overall, from planning to forecasting to increasing customer relationships, cloud computing always provides a compelling return on investments and cost optimization for every business unit.

So, here it goes!! Are you having a digital mindset? Think about Cloud-native security. Most of the businesses these days are hiring full-service digital agencies that offer a wide range of product development services like SaaS application development, web app development, and many more. Apart from this, few good players in the market like Rapidops, Algoworks, etc. provide full-fledged development from scratch along with agile support before, during, and after an application’s life-cycle.

Partnering with the development company for your digital mindset will save you a lot more than time and cost. Businesses are taking advantage of their core competency and get full consultation before developing anything new. Software-development companies will not only launch the applications for your digital growth but also help you to train your employees as well as your customers, which will help you overcome resistance to change.