IT modernisation in the face of changing behaviour
The trend towards an ever more digitised world creates a gold-rush opportunity for disruptive organisations seeking to lead their sectors with new customer focussed technologies. These disruptors and early-adopters stand to reap the rewards of increased market share and build new customer revenues at the expense of their traditional, less nimble competitors.
Those that innovate and embrace digitisation to address evolving customer demands stand to thrive against their traditional competitors and reduce the scope for new digital entrants (such as Uber or AirBnB) rising out-of-the-blue and altering the market forever.
The trend towards the Smartphone with omnipresent Wireless networks makes real-time price and service comparison already a reality for most B2C services and increasingly for B2B, whilst the customer demand for a smooth self-service experience through e-commerce and post-sales management portals erode personal ties into an organisation and make it so much easier for customers to vote with their feet if the whole experience isn’t what they expect.
The digital economy demands on overhaul of traditional IT to support the evolution in customer experience, with our customer interactions becoming increasingly online and non-human throughout the purchase and service lifecycle. It’s a trend that places IT agility and application security front and centre in the Smartphone, App generation.
Saleable IT architecture is a must to support an uptick in this digital activity; in both B2C and B2B with a shift away from traditional bricks-and-mortar, face-to-face or voice channels towards omnichannel interactions now including real-time web-chat, rich website experiences and video on demand. Looking forward, the rising preference for effective self-service supports the implementation of Big Data to enrich Business Analytics and drive informed decision making, both at board level to optimise strategy, but also at the micro level and in real-time, with past performance guiding customer handling in each situation.
As Big Data and Business Analytics combine to guide our decision making, the data that underpins these systems provides the raw materials to extend into Machine Learning and real-time Artificial Intelligence technologies to extend the scope, accuracy and efficacy of the self-service tasks that users increasingly require in their consumption of our products and services.
The traditional organisation is already on the back foot, with the new digital disruptor able to deploy and scale a slick new pay-as-you-grow Cloud IT platform from day 1, making it important that established firms begin early planning to understand how to develop agility within their existing, legacy systems.
Whilst a rip-and-replace migration of IT systems is one feared (and expensive) way to join the digital era, it’s rarely practical, sensible or even necessary. With strategic planning, many new agile and elastic technologies such as Fabric Networking, Hybrid Cloud, Business Analytics and Network Security can all be seamlessly layered upon existing infrastructure as a part of an ROI sensitive, phased and low-risk modernisation strategy towards a nimble next-generation IT platform that scales on demand to address our customers changing behaviours.