Top 10 Digital Drivers for the Enterprise

Enterprise IT, world over has been seeing sifting changes in terms of the basic delivery model from an on-premises to the cloud, and harnessing the power of cloud services and pay-as-you-use services, and now to stay relevant, it is become an existential matter that business small or large adopt these changes in the basic tools and system they use.

Typically there has been a shift for standard businesses like manufacturing, trading or distributions, to use IT for their operations like CRM, ERP, HR etc. While there still exists a large percentage of traditional enterprises that are yet to adopt IT effectively for their core business functions, we see an emergence of new IT enabled platforms and tools that businesses are keen on getting themselves hooked on. This route is promising in the sense that enterprises can bypass the arduous process of having to implement point solutions for each of their business functions which comes with the pain of identifying suitable vendors for each requirements, managing their IT infrastructure and upfront cost for systems and administrations etc. Vs, hooking themselves on to a platform that does all the IT heavy lifting for them while getting unparalleled benefits of a digitally powered business.

Listing here some of the emerging trends that are taking shape in the enterprise IT landscape

Fully Integrated — ERP — ERP is the bedrock of any enterprise and the success in getting the full value out an ERP depends on the following -

a. Choice of the right ERP software that suits your business requirements & strategic fit — its developer friendliness and ease of realising new forms, workflows, integrations, and requirements as new business scenarios emerge for the enterprise is a crucial factor in choosing the right ERP.

b. Effectiveness of the implementation partner — both technical and domain competence of the partner, their SLAs are key factors. A timely and effective Roll-out — taking into account the business readiness, right champions in the enterprise who can drive adoption are key to this aspect.

c. End user training & adoption and post delivery support. This mainly depends on the internal champions both functional and technical members of the team.

d. And the total cost of ownership is another big one.

Domain Specific SaaS tools — It is becoming more common of coherent apps with the focus on meeting a specific need within the industry vertical. In the case of a cabinetry manufacturing company it could be design tools that enables the sales designers to create their designs on-the-fly and collaborate with the end customer on finalising their specifications and design. Another would be merchandising apps, enabling retail stores to augment their business with certain online capabilities — like placing orders via an app, home delivery services etc. Or a restaurant chain that plugs themselves to apps like swiggy and zomato for servicing online orders and delivery which sees a bigger turnaround in sales for the business, even small healthcare clinics and independent practitioners to plug themselves to platforms like Practo to completely automate their appointments, schedules, online ratings, feedbacks, and customer support, Billing and accounting everything through Practo.

Business user apps & tools for the widely geographically dispersed & remote workforce — we see a surge in the adoption of smart apps and tools that equip companies with operations in a good geographic spread. Tools from taking your remote attendance (face recognition based), to being present on a corporate portal for the realtime communications and see the company pulse and be in touch with everyone else. Also usage of Online Collaboration & Productivity tools for video calls, gsuite, chat groups, tasks & projects. The effective adoption of these smart tools has seen the company’s workforce productivity go over the roof.

API oriented IT architecture— In cases of building certain services internally, sticking to an API oriented architecture is somewhat ensuring that it makes it easy to integrate those services to talk to other apps and services, maybe internal or 3rd party services of your vendors, partners, customers. This makes it possible for setting a base of easy integrations and for future readiness.

Cloud — your superpower ally for the heavy lifting and for rapid high end compute apps deployments. Always keep an eye on the cloud platforms that offer tons of managed services that makes it very easy to run workloads that are high compute intense as well as cases of high availability requirements for certain mission critical tasks for the business. Also for the purpose of running your POCs and tests — cloud is a go to place instead of resorting to inhouse compute resources. It is always good to have a spread of choices from the various cloud services providers for the different requirements. Each cloud service provider has their strengths in certain types of use cases. For example Hiroku is the goto place for one click deployment kind of scenarios. Another cloud to keep a look out for is Render Cloud and it is gaining popularity in the PaaS space, among the biggies like AWS, Azure & Google.

Data intelligence — Deriving actionable insights from the data that is created through your transactions and systems is no longer an option for the enterprises of any scale of the future. The different ways of systematically collecting the data from various sources origin (It could be from the CRM, ERP, or projects & ticketing tools, system logs), storing them in a data warehouse for deriving actionable insights that supports making key business decisions — the options of tools that allows such data crunching and analytics are catching up at a very fast pace. Tools like — Metabase is very simple to start your data exploration journey and then as next step going for running predictive models and triggers is the next natural progression for the data journey for any company.

Augmented Reality — It is not long since we are going to see the next iterations of Mobile devices with the apps around AR functionalities. AR is not only a force for the gaming industry anymore — but is gaining good traction in the space of Business Apps, Education, Multi channel sales experiences. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg predicts about the disruptions around AR in the next five years — we see the platforms and tools around AR is already mature to the point that we can build experiences and apps that shape the future of business apps and thin the gap between our real and virtual world to a great extent.

Adoption of Intuitive User Interfaces for Business Apps — Raising the bar of the user interfaces of business apps to come in parity with how consumer apps like Facebook or Gmail are built is the new normal. We are going to see the bar raise for business apps a lot to see a consumer like touch to most of the interactions and intuitive is the word that makes it appeal to the new age workforce to enhance their productivity at work using the softwares and tools that they need to work with.

In-House Dev Culture — enterprises need to move from seeing IT as a vendor driven service that they subscribe to or consume, to rather building an in-house dev culture. Traditionally IT was seen as a supporting function or a non-core competency department, that existed as a backend support division. But that is changing, with companies seeing the rapid advancement in digital technology that is impacting every aspect of how a modern business is run. So it is vital for any non-tech company to have a workforce mix consisting of a bunch of software developers too. The value of companies that nurture a dev culture early on is going to be leaps and bounds especially giving them the edge in adapting to the changing business and technology landscapes quickly and cost effectively. Future businesses are not going to be just an IT consumer — but IT is going to be the primary core of the business around which business models and services evolve for the business.

Business readiness to cater to the online marketplace — All of the above technology trends boils down to one big thing that you don’t want to miss in the next decade — that is to be able to transform your enterprise to a completely online business, serving both the online market as well as integrating with the backend supply chain and the whole manufacturing partners entirely through digital means via apps and services. This is sure to be the next big way to stay relevant, scale and grow your business to other markets globally.