Digital Transformation has moved on from being just a novel method of engaging key stakeholders and integrating multiple data sources for business benefit. Successful corporations across industry sectors have used the SMAC (Social, Media Analytics & Cloud) stack and deployed innovative methods of User Experience and User Interfaces to engage customers or employees. Even late adopters are now coming to the digital party.
A wide range of benefits have been reported by organizations: acceleration of product and service development, acting on intelligence in real time, equipment sensors and location-aware technologies connecting with manufacturing shop floors and fully integrating data with Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Cyber Security has become an important investment area and ensuring every department and function is digitally ready has become one of the top priorities.
While the excitement over the early success of digital is still apparent everywhere, a new set of technologies (DARQ) is poised to augment earlier success stories and provide new opportunities to innovate and scale digitally. Distributed ledgers or block chains are forming across industries to enable an easy transfer of data in a high security environment, and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are making the graduation from descriptive analytics and visual dashboards to predictive and prescriptive analytics an easy process. Extended Reality environments, particularly augmented and virtual reality, are transforming training and simulation. The immense power offered by Quantum computing and 5G will enable previously arduous processing tasks to be accomplished in a fraction of the time.
What are the use cases that organizations will seek to create and bring to their stakeholders in this new DARQ era? Beyond the adoption of technology, how should organizations think of digital twinning, career management and building competitive advantage in their industry? The future is full of possibilities and digital disruptors will continue to win.
