Here’s how to untangle the mess and make tangible progress toward your digital transformation.

1. Choose one overarching digital transformation goal

First, commit to one primary goal that can deliver substantial value to the organization. This value could be in the form of new markets, cost savings, or other areas. The biggest challenge is picking a goal for which you’re willing to sacrifice other goals.

It’s tempting to believe that you can juggle multiple goals at once, but this rarely works in practice. Most of us feel that we’re capable of multitasking, but the research shows otherwise. Similarly, when we’re juggling multiple priorities, we may feel like we’re getting more done, but the reality may not support this.

No matter how thoughtfully you define your primary goal, it will often interfere with other aspects of your environment. These interferences can quickly create a long list of mid-sized projects that can pull your focus away from the primary goal.

Remember that not all of these projects must – or can – be done; you’ll need to sacrifice some to prioritize your primary goal.

2. Prioritize your mid-sized projects

Deciding which mid-sized projects to skip or work around isn’t easy. To determine which smaller projects will have the biggest impact on your primary goal, consider the following questions:

Will the project create a substantial amount of work in your primary goal?

Consider a scenario in which you’re implementing a secure Voice-over-IP (VoIP) solution to enable a workforce that’s now working from home. If you skipped over the mid-sized project to implement a more efficient VPN solution, you may need to redo the work on the VoIP system later. In such a case, completing the associated mid-sized projects is appropriate – and necessary.

If the mid-sized project fails, could it jeopardize your primary goal?

Consider an aging file server that works but for which maintenance is no longer available. You may be able to get the remote workers to VPN into the server and use the file system – but it’s probably easier to put the necessary files in a cloud-based synchronization solution, even if that means accepting another mid-sized project.

Can you leverage quid pro quo?

In politics, quid pro quo is a bad thing: It generally means that if you do a favor for someone, they’re expected to do one for you in return.

There are almost certainly people inside your organization whose help you’ll need to complete your goal, and these people may ask you to prioritize their own projects. This is another way that you may end up wrangling numerous mid-sized projects in the service of your one big goal.

Completing moderately difficult projects can help you gain support for your initiative when you most need it. Be careful, though – if you take on too many of these projects, you may find your efforts diluted, leaving you with a mess of conflicting priorities and tangled dependencies.

Nowsaday, almost every major companies and corporations are gradually applying technological solutions to their business. In order not to be left behind in this race, do not hesitate to contact our company – Opus Solution – a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in providing potential technology solutions to enhance your business performance. Recently, we have just built and launched eoffice solution, Tasken eOffice, which integrates the most advanced features, not only to help you save costs and time, but also improve the productivity of your business.

3. Find the quick wins

Before you start working on your primary goal, look for low-hanging fruit – things you can do quickly, easily, and without much investment that will start paying dividends immediately. Those dividends are measured in time – time that you’ll ultimately use to drive forward your goal. These include frequently repeated tasks and methods you already use to increase efficiency – for example, onboarding and offboarding.

Prioritizing for transformation is never easy. But if you commit to one primary goal, engage only in mid-level projects that support your goal, and find easy opportunities to boost efficiency, you will be on the path to success.

The Enterprises Project

The post Digital transformation: 3 tips to prioritize goals and projects appeared first on Opus Solution.

Ongoing digital transformation across industries became a given in 2019. At the same time, digital transformation fatigue also became very real.

Looking ahead, 2020 will be a year of some reckoning for digital initiatives – and that’s ultimately good news. “2020 will still see the rapid scaling of digital initiatives across industries,” says Steve Hall, partner and president of global technology research and advisory firm ISG. “In many areas, CIOs and organizations have prepped their organizations for change but haven’t made the full leap to transforming their culture to fully embrace the change.”

Digital transformation trends for 2020

When thinking about 2020, IT leaders should be prepared not only to lead a greater cultural shift in the enterprise, but also to prepare for DT-centric shifts in the IT service provider sector, get real about data governance, embrace AI and insight-driven innovation, and explore more fully the benefits of public cloud adoption. Let’s dig into these trends and takeaway advice for IT leaders:

1. Digital operating models become mandatory

ISG’s Hall predicts rapid adoption, including integrated cross-functional teams. “CIOs need to lead the culture change within organizations and create the digital backbone and underlying capabilities to power the transformation,” Hall says. “CIOs who hold back or resist the change risk losing the trust of their boards and significantly impacting the long-term health of their enterprises.”

2. More data, more problems

Big data is about to get even bigger. “The big data problem – the increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data – isn’t new, but it’s compounding. Now we have mobile data, sensor data, voice data… the list goes on,” says Ankur Laroia, managing director at BDO Houston. “The amount of data that needs to be stored doubles every six months, and it’s increasingly in unstructured formats that make it difficult to integrate and synthesize into something meaningful.”

Cheap storage makes massive data collection possible, but not necessarily recommended. There’s been talk of the importance of data governance for years, but it’s no longer negotiable. “We’re starting to see a shakeout as those that have invested in data governance and analytics leapfrog their competitors,” Laroia says. “Building an insight engine will be a top priority in 2020 – because it’s necessary to survival.”

What’s more, new regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) demand more careful data management, according to analysts at Technology Business Research Inc. (TBR). As a result, data lakes will be falling out of favor. “Without proper planning and management of data streams going in, numerous accessibility issues can result,” says Laroia. “Not only are they incredibly complex to get right, but over-preservation of data can result in significant data privacy and compliance risk.”

3. AI takes center stage

Even once all that data is wrangled, making sense of it at scale in a usable way will require some help from our machine friends. In fact, say digital experts, AI will be the key to delivering business outcomes with digital transformation. “AI is one of the technologies that will help standardize the digital transformation market and turn the wildly loose use of the term ‘digital’ into tangible business results,” the TBR analysts wrote in a September 2019 Digital Transformation Insights report. AI will permeate all functions, from sales and marketing to HR and finance.

Machine-learning algorithms have also matured and expanded over the past year. “IT leaders should incorporate them into their business-driven data analytics strategy in 2020 to more quickly and effectively synthesize and present insights gleaned from the massive amounts of enterprise data – far more than teams of human data scientists can ever hope to assimilate,” says Rahul Singh, managing director with Pace Harmon. “This will provide their business stakeholders with a competitive first-mover advantage.”

Machine learning and AI can also be leveraged within modern data architecture paradigms to automate and mitigate the data governance problem – from aggregation and cleansing all the way through to extraction in an analytics-ready format, says Laroia.

4. M&A shakes up IT services

Merger and acquisition activity in the IT outsourcing industry has accelerated as traditional IT service providers are acquiring engineering and digital marketing firms to bring new capabilities to their clients. Three-quarters of the 2,200 tech acquisitions made in the last year were analytics firms, digital solutions providers, engineering firms, or digital agencies, according to Hall.

“This record pace of acquisitions will continue to reshape the landscape for CIOs and the service providers they partner with,” Hall says. “The M&A activity will be a major source of disruption for CIOs as they are challenged to recognize potential synergies, but more importantly, to integrate digital capabilities into their product lines.”

5. New digital transformation allies emerge

Those service providers that don’t acquire their way to digital prominence will partner to do so. “No vendor can do it all, despite many positioning themselves as end-to-end service providers,” TBR analysts wrote in their September 2019 Digital Transformation Insights report. “Technology partners are and will remain an integral part of India-centric and consulting vendors’ go-to-market strategies, especially as clients seek off-the-shelf, minimally customizable solutions.”

While alliances within the sector are nothing new, the digital transformation era may see vendors teaming up on marketing and developing dedicated, branded spaces within their innovation hubs or design studios, says TBR senior analyst Patrick Heffernan. Some consultancies will likely need to become ‘frenemies’ and create three-way federated partnerships where each party plays to its strengths and provides depth in domain and delivery expertise, the report adds.

What about cloud and digital transformation trends? Let’s explore:

6. Public cloud adoption expands

Over the past few years, most of the focus on moving to the cloud has been around adoption of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS as companies look to leverage the efficiency, scale, and elasticity of cloud services to optimize their spend and reduce cycle times, Pace Harmon’s Singh says. In 2020, the focus will shift more to enabling innovation.

“Cloud service providers have been building out intelligent automation and service capabilities on analytics, AI and machine learning, and customer engagement, to name a few, which enables enterprise IT organizations to accelerate adoption of these capabilities and quickly drive business value,” Singh explains. IT leaders will want to look at how they can leverage public cloud capabilities to accelerate value rather than investing time and money building them internally, he advises.

7. New digital transformation metrics will emerge

“The reality is, many digital transformations fail because companies aren’t integrating their business and technology strategies from the start,” says ServiceNow’s CIO Chris Bedi. “But it’s imperative that CIOs know how to quantify their progress with AI and digitization technologies and understand how to effectively communicate this value to key stakeholders.”

In 2020 and beyond, Bedi predicts, CIOs will develop more methodical evaluation criteria for digital projects, focused on measuring proficiency across three key areas:

• Velocity: The speed of processes and how quickly work gets done
• Intelligence: The ability of analytics to automate and improve decision effectiveness
• Experience: Experiences that drive the right behavioral and economic outcomes

8. IT takes the long view on digital insights

Unfortunately, many early digital initiatives were reactive responses to a need in the moment. At this point in time, however, it makes more sense to take a step back at the start of new projects to ensure they deliver maximum value.

“IT leaders should embrace what we call ‘insight-first” innovation,” says BDO’s Laroia. “’Insight-first’ innovation focuses not only on solving the immediate need, but also on maximizing the long-term potential of organizational data. By intentionally building in data capture, every digital initiative presents an opportunity to improve and democratize business intelligence across the enterprise.”

The Enterprises Project

The post 8 digital transformation trends for 2020 appeared first on Opus Solution.

A new report by application network provider MuleSoft has revealed a number of consistent difficulties experienced by global organizations as they undertake digital transformation initiatives.

The global study – which boasts more than 600 respondents across the US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, and China – has found integration to be the key challenge. The vast majority of businesses say only a small proportion of their applications are integrated with each other, while demand on IT teams has grown well beyond budgets and capacity in many cases.

Customer experience continues to emerge as a key driver for digital transformation

The 2019 Connectivity benchmark report finds that 97% of organizations are currently undertaking or planning to undertake digital transformation initiatives.

While businesses are striving to increase their IT operating efficiency via digital transformation, customer experience is now the second most cited main goal for these initiatives.

Organizations are turning to digital tech – such as analytics – to fully understand their customers. The prevalence and accessibility of mobile and cloud technologies are helping businesses deliver a seamless experience across devices and channels. Furthermore, consumers are expecting efficiency across these channels – agile, real-time experiences which are consistent and satisfying.

Challenges

But integration of digital technologies across fast-growing organizations remains incredibly difficult. Data, apps and even entire teams can remain siloed.

The report finds that the average number of apps used in global organizations is around 900, but the percentage of those being integrated has stalled at just 29% (the same proportion as in 2018). IT infrastructure is frequently to blame for these integration issues.

IT teams are increasingly the key enabler to implement digital transformation within businesses, but the proportion of budgets they can devote to this has remained stagnant. These teams are often required to do more with less year on year.

This lack of integration has a knock-on effect. While 97% of IT leaders say they are currently undertaking or planning to undertake digital transformation initiatives, just 36% believe that they provide a completely connected user experience across all channels.

There is a clear disconnect here, and serious doubts as to whether digital transformation among global businesses is progressing as it should be. Nine in every 10 respondents agree that not successfully implementing digital initiatives will negatively impact revenues.

A look at where businesses are investing shows – in the first place – how customer-centric digital technologies are, while also highlighting how much demand is placed on IT teams.

Security, big data/analytics, IoT, and AI/machine learning are all being implemented by organizations to either protect or improve the experiences of the consumer. But each of these technologies add extra strain on IT teams.

59% of respondents report that their team finds it hard to introduce new technologies because of their legacy technology systems, while 65% report that it’s difficult to make changes to a particular system or application as a result.

Roadmap

The key strategy among global businesses in light of these digital transformation difficulties is to hire more talent. 52% are planning to do just this in 2019, while 44% plan to outsource projects to contractors.

is also increasingly being touted as a route to improve the efficiency of application production and deployment, with 50% of respondents working to make more of their organizational processes automated.

46% say they plan to reuse software components and 39% are looking to leverage APIs.

Takeaways

For nearly all global businesses, digital transformation is clearly a fundamental part of their business strategy in 2019. However, even those who have made great strides in implementing digital initiatives across their organizations are struggling to ensure new technologies are integrated with each other as well as existing applications.

The result is quite a worry for IT leaders. Many speak of data silos where apps are not well-connected – and even entire teams are operating in semi-isolation. A vast majority of respondents highlight that integration needs to be happening beyond the IT department across business analysts, marketing departments, sales teams etc. too.

The drive to improve customer experience in a multichannel, data-centric, agile business context is fantastic for consumers. But IT departments are seeing resources stretched as digital initiatives, such as those concerning security and analytics, increase in importance and investment. This doesn’t look good for staff wellbeing on these teams, and many expect revenues to be impacted negatively if initiatives are completed.

Consequently, there is no magic bullet for improving integration and completing transformation initiatives. More budget, staff and outsourcing of projects will undoubtedly improve capacity for IT teams. But businesses need to be looking at DevOps, reusable software assets, and enterprise-wide API strategies to improve processes and efficiency – and to ensure digital technologies can really fulfill their potential.

ClickZ

The post Digital transformation: Top challenges to success in 2019 appeared first on Opus Solution.

In the past few months, the concept of “Industrial Revolution 4.0″ has been widely talked about in the media and social networks. Along with that is the promise of “life changing” of businesses in Vietnam if our country can catch up the wave. Therefore, how should this revolution be understood?

Definition of Industrial Revolution 4.0

Industrial Revolution 4.0

According to Gartner, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 (or the Fourth Industrial Revolution) comes from the “Industrie 4.0″ concept in a German government report in 2013. “Industrie 4.0″ connects embedded systems and intelligent manufacturing facilities to create digital convergence between the Industry, Business, functions and internal processes.

If the Gartner definition is confusing, Klaus Schwab, founder and president of the World Economic Forum, gives a simpler view of the Industrial Revolution 4.0:

“The first industrial revolution utilized water and steam power to mechanize production. The second revolution took place through the use of electricity for mass production. The third revolution uses electronics and information technology to automate production. Now, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is flourishing from the third revolution that combines technologies together, blurring the boundaries between physics, digital and biology. ”

According to Klaus Schwab, the breakthrough speed of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 is “without precedent”. Compared to previous industrial revolutions, 4.0 is evolving under an exponential rather than linear speed. Moreover, it is breaking most of the industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes signal the transformation of the entire production, management and administration system.

How will the Industry Revolution 4.0 work?

Followed by the definition of Klaus Schwab, the Industry Revolution 4.0 will take place on three main areas: Biotechnology, Digital and Physics.

The core elements of Digital in Industry Revolution 4.0 will be: AI, Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data.

In the field of biotechnology, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 focuses on research to create leaps in agriculture, fisheries, medicine, food processing, environmental protection, renewable energy, chemistry and materials.

Finally, the field of physics with new robots, 3D printers, self-driving cars, new materials (graphene, skyrmions …) and nanotechnology.

Currently the Industry Revolution 4.0 is taking place in developed countries like USA, Europe and part of Asia. In addition to the new opportunities, the industrial revolution 4.0 also pose challenges for mankind to face.

Opportunities along with global risks and challenges 

The downside of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 is that it can cause inequality. Especially can break the labor market. When automation replaces manual labor in the economy, when robots replace people in many areas, millions of workers around the world may fall into unemployment, especially those who work in the field of insurance, real estate brokerage, financial consulting, transportation.

Machinery will push millions of workers into unemployment. Photo: Siemens.

The report of the World Economic Forum has raised this issue at different stages. The first stage will be the challenge for office workers, intellectuals, technical workers. The next stage will be cheap labor, which may be slower. With the movement of this revolution, in the next 15 years the world will have a new face, requiring businesses to change.

Then, the economic turmoil that has arisen from the Industrial Revolution will lead to life insecurity. Its implications will be political instability. If governments do not understand and fully prepare for the 4.0 industry wave, the risk of global instability is entirely possible.

In addition, changes in the way people communicate on the Internet put people at risk for financial health. Personal information, if not safely protected, can lead to undesirable consequences.

The 4th Industrial Revolution brings opportunity, and also challenges for humanity.

The post What is Industrial Revolution 4.0 actually? appeared first on Opus Solution.