The technology landscape is constantly evolving. Blink your eyes and you’ve missed the next iteration of a piece of software, a platform, or an idea. And even though the speed at which our world is changing can be quite dizzying and next to impossible to keep up with, this is a good thing for business.
Why?
Because technology makes it possible for your business to compete better within your market. Without new technology, you’d be left behind, while your competition reaps the benefit of spending the time and effort to employ the latest and greatest tools. That’s why you need digital adoption strategies that keep you at the forefront of technological advancements. You need to embrace a digital acceleration process that allows you to quickly integrate new technologies as they appear.
Although it might seem like an impossible task to keep up with this digital acceleration, it’s not. There are ways you can not only keep up but get ahead of the game. Once you’ve found yourself at the apex of the learning curve, you can settle in and enjoy the ride.
But before you reach that milestone, you must work to achieve digital acceleration. How? Let’s find out together.
Discover Your Needs
The first thing you must do is discover where your business lags behind in the digital transformation. For example, is the phone your primary means of communicating with clients and customers? If that’s the case, you’re already way behind.
People don’t answer their phones unless they know who’s calling (and there’s a compelling reason for them to answer). If your business depends on calls (or, even worse, cold calls), you’re already failing.
In order to join the digital revolution, you must employ more modern means of communication. Your first thought might be email— but that isn’t all there is to it. Younger generations (such as millennials) don’t have time to read lengthy emails, they want their conversations to be under 240 characters and include emojis.
To that end, your business needs to seriously reconsider how it communicates with clients, customers, and consumers. SMS messages, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook—those should be your first point of entry for communication. In order to make this digital transformation a success, you have to first think young. How would your teen or twenty-something child want you to communicate with them? Answer that question and you’re on your way to understanding communication in the digital world.
The Cloud Is Your Friend
It’s time you ditch that old-school way of thinking with the company network. And I’m not just talking about a LAN-centric distributed system of files and folders. I’m also talking about where you deploy your web-based applications. You’ve hired the best JavaScript and Python developers you can find, so why waste them on creating standard applications or applications you’ll serve up from a data center that doesn’t scale to meet the growing demand of the market?
Instead, migrate to the cloud. Use services like Google Workspace to make it easier for your employees to work and collaborate, and use platforms like AWS and Google Cloud to serve up those web-based applications. By migrating to those platforms, you can be sure the infrastructure will scale as high as you need it.
That is one digital transformation that will make a big difference in how well you can keep up with the competition.
AI Will Show You the Way
When you are tasked to comb through massive amounts of data or attempt to optimize your software solutions, chances are pretty good your human mind isn’t quite up to the task. Take, for instance, the optimization of containers within a Kubernetes cluster. You might think it’s as simple as adjusting the requests and limits for each container within a pod, but then you realize you’re faced with making tiny adjustments for over 20 containers within a manifest. How do you do that on your own, in a timeframe that can actually make a difference?
You can’t.
For tasks like that, you turn to Artificial Intelligence. A computer CPU is far more efficient at crunching numbers than you are, so why not make use of this new technology that can not only do the job more quickly, but learn ways to better improve your entire delivery pipeline.
If you have Python developers on staff, you are one step closer to implementing AI into your systems.
Automation Is Key
Like AI, you’re going to need to consider automation. I’m not talking about robots to replace humans as your employee of choice. Instead, I’m talking about using software solutions to automate certain tasks in your delivery or development chain.
For example, if you’re already using a cloud-based service to deliver web-based applications to customers, you can set up automation such that those applications will be automatically updated, directly from your developer’s GitHub repositories. Even better, the updates can be automatically triggered by even the slightest commit to a JavaScript or Ruby file.
In a similar fashion to AI, automation will make your delivery systems exponentially faster, more predictable, and reliable.
Mobile Is the Now and the Future
Over half of web usage is done over mobile devices. That isn’t going to shrink. In fact, mobile device market share is only going to continue to rise until a vast majority of people around the globe only access the internet via a mobile device.
Because of this, your business has to be mobile-friendly. But not sometime in the future—now. If your company website isn’t already designed for mobile usage, you’re way behind the digital transformation curve.
But you can’t just think about this in terms of optimizing your website for small devices. You have to think in terms of mobile apps as a way to deliver an experience to possible clients and consumers. Those mobile apps and web-apps can do a great job of making it possible for consumers to interact with your company in a much more immediate way. That immediacy will translate to more clients, more sales, more profit.
Mobile apps can make a difference for your workforce, too. You can develop your own custom apps to improve internal processes, provide new communication channels for your staff, and have a more robust digital ecosystem overall.
Conclusion
It’s time your company accelerates its digital transformation with a reputable digital transformation development company. This is one bandwagon you don’t want to miss. Every second you hesitate to start this full-scale, company-wide digital shift, you waste precious time you’ll never get back.
So, what are you waiting for?
