Article Accelerate Digital Projects to Harness Innovation
AWS Solutions Architect at Insight, John Chatterton, explores how the acceleration of digital projects has brought advanced IT innovations into our everyday world – innovations that are powering growth.
What the past two years have taught us is that when things change quickly, people, processes and technology can adapt just as rapidly. One of the major lessons we learnt is that innovation can happen at pace when necessary. Look at the speed in which businesses made decisions that enabled people to keep working. Digital projects took centre stage to allow businesses to continue operating, enabling some to actually flourish. We witnessed first-hand how embracing digital technologies like cloud accelerated opportunities to transform business to go further and do more. The rapid adoption of digital tech provided a springboard for innovations to take flight that might previously have seemed a long way off.
Practically every area of a business uses technology as a driving force for change. If we’re not continually asking, ‘what else will this let us do?’, then we should. After all, what’s the point of technology if it just allows us to stand still? Get IT right and you have a robust foundation for innovation and a future geared for growth.
Let’s consider some of the innovations that accelerated digital projects have put within our reach. Our friends at Gartner have identified four key technologies that will help organisations accelerate growth and scale cost-efficiencies in 2022. These focus on bringing together physical and virtual worlds to enable new ways of working, elevate the idea of a ‘total experience’ and spark creativity.
Generative AI
This Artificial intelligence that applies algorithms to text, audio files, or images to create new content. Rather than being a buzzy new tech concept, it’s increasingly being used in the real world. Essentially, it uses AI algorithms on existing data from products, content and customer experiences to create a replica or ‘digital twin’ of a real thing which can be used for modelling scenarios, prototyping and testing in areas like drug development.
Autonomic systems
These give tasks the autonomy to make their own decisions without supervision, learn and modify their behaviour. They also have agency, a sense of their own internal state so they can act independently on the decisions they make. They’re used in areas like communications networks to optimise performance and have a place in the development of robots and drones.
Total experience (TX)
Rather than treating Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and User Experience as separate digital initiatives, TX combines them to create a superior shared experience for all. By 2026, 60% of large enterprises are predicted to use TX to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer advocacy and employee productivity.
Distributed enterprise
As we adapt to hybrid working, with employees and customer services able to work wherever best suits them and the organisation, the distributed enterprise has become very real. Gartner expects that by 2023 75% of organisations that exploit distributed enterprise benefits will see revenue grow 25% faster than competitors. For many organisations, the ability to ‘work from anywhere’ has become part of their strategic business model.
Theories and strategies are all very well, but they only become reality when they are put into practice. This doesn’t come without challenges but once you overcome them the outcomes will be transformative.
Digital business really is the future of operations. These four innovations, and others, will no doubt have an impact on your business strategy. Each of the innovations I’ve mentioned above are already in play and making an impact on practically every business and consumer market. What connects them, and makes them possible, is cloud technology. For Gartner, cloud provides the services platform for driving innovation and disrupting markets in ways that lead to growth, better customer retention and efficiency. Who would disagree with that?
If cloud is part of your digital business strategy – and it is for most organisations – you will want to make sure you are optimising it to support your current operations and forward-looking innovation. Insight is partnering with AWS and VMware to make your next step to cloud and digital business innovation faster, easier and more flexible.
