Even as the pandemic has disrupted our lives this past year, creating an undeniable environment of uncertainty, it has acted also as a catalyst by accelerating the pace of digital evolution. Today, it has become a matter of survival for organizations to innovate and transform into Intelligent Enterprises by adopting new business models and revenue streams.

According to IDC[1], digitally transformed organizations can generate 8 times more revenue and 2 times more profitability by improving their productivity, cost efficiencies, and processes, as compared to those that are complacent in adopting emerging technologies into their processes and systems.

However, for organizations that are already over the curve in terms of digital transformations, the logical question is – what next? Let us take a quick look at what intelligent enterprises need to do to gear up for 2021.

I. Need to build business resiliency, backed by a robust and efficient IT

Going beyond the business continuity strategies, organizations are now looking at best practices to help in building business resiliency to meet the present as well as any future disruptive events. To do that, organizations need to establish and maintain a strong IT operations team that ensures undisrupted uptime of the business applications in the company’s on-premises datacenters as well as public clouds, manages multiple resources including servers, storage systems, networks, firewalls, applications and databases, and ensures uninterrupted and smooth IT services especially during unprecedented crisis situations. Organizations also need to put in place processes that help in predictive monitoring of any anomaly in the systems, building a self-healing IT infrastructure, and support Disaster Recovery (DR) automation.

II. Adoption of industry cloud

It is predicted that by 2025, all enterprises will use cloud to improve efficiencies, and more than 85% of enterprise applications will be deployed in the cloud[2]. The past few months have witnessed businesses adopting hybrid multi-cloud as the most preferred solution for reducing costs and productively transferring their workloads to the cloud. With more than 80%[3] of the organizations operating on a multi-cloud strategy at present, the demand for industry-specific clouds is on the rise.

III. Transforming into a “digital-first” business model

What began as a knee-jerk reaction to a crisis, has transformed into a new way of operating. With virtualization and digitalization becoming the new norms, companies are reimagining their business models to become more agile, data-centric, asset-light and shift from product-based to a service-based model with a digital ecosystem.

Developing a digitally connected enterprise underpinned by intelligent automation, building a digital, flexible and employee-oriented talent workforce, and most importantly, having appropriate digital and leadership skills showcased by the C-suite management is imperative to augment virtual team cultures for new workforce models in the future years.

IV. Re-strategizing the supply chain system

To meet the evolving consumer and market demands of the new normal, organizations are moving towards localized, ethical and efficient supply chain models from the existing globalized, low cost, just-in-time structure. Intelligent technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT)) would play a crucial role in areas of demand sensing and forecasting. Multichannel, multimodal supply chains built on a scaffolding of intelligent workflows offering enhanced customer experience, agility and real-time response to ever-changing business and market dynamics is crucial to organizational recovery, resiliency, and growth in the coming years.

V. Deeper focus on customer experience and engagement

Organizations need to develop operating models that are silo-free, cyber safe, predictive and real-time to support informed decisions on customer sentiments. This would also enable organizations to deliver customer delight in their interactions using the latest technologies.

VI. Talent, Intelligent Workforce

Business leaders and HR heads need to accelerate the process of re-evaluating and re-inventing their existing Learning and Development (L&D) strategies to include re-and up-skilling of their employees to meet the challenges of the emerging digital business operations.

Also, it has become imperative to lay down well-defined and adaptive workforce engagement, experience, and inclusion strategies that cover the changing employee needs, understand and value the importance of home and work responsibilities for a diversified workforce in a remote or hybrid working model.

Establishing technological solutions and tools to integrate these above-mentioned aspects to become a digital to the core, intelligent enterprise, business leaders need to partner with technology solutions service providers such as Saberpoint to cater to their diversified needs and find the best-fit solutions across processes, functions, and operations to meet the current and future challenges of the new normal.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2020/09/22/why-the-time-is-now-to-become-an-intelligent-enterprise/?sh=4d89bbda1724

[2] https://carrier.huawei.com/en/spotlight/reshaping-b2b-together-through-cloud-services/industry-cloud#:~:text=Industries’%20digital%20transformation%20is%20accelerating,be%20deployed%20in%20the%20cloud.&text=It’s%20a%20new%20business%20model%20for%20operators.

[3] https://www.computersolutionseast.com/blog/good-to-know/cloud-2021-features-and-trends/