The Secret to Unlocking Business Transformation at Speed

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Tech Insights for ProfessionalsThe latest thought leadership for IT pros

Monday, November 2, 2020

In the fast-paced business world, transformation has become necessary to make progress and generate new value, opportunities and efficiencies. In times of market turbulence and disruption, businesses require agile reinventions to ensure sustained growth. This has made business transformation vital for organizations seeking to thrive with rapidly changing market demands.

Article 4 Minutes
The Secret to Unlocking Business Transformation at Speed

Business transformation is the opportunity to rethink your business models and make strategic decisions that affect growth, operation and performance. It’s about finding and implementing alternate solutions within an organization to deliver better employee and customer experiences. It’s not a simple process, especially if you have outdated technological systems.

Why is business transformation necessary?

Change is continuous. It’s inevitable. Without it, businesses find themselves purchasing off-the-shelf solutions that for their objectives, require significant time investments and additional developments to make it fit for purpose which creates dependencies on a specific version of the solution and makes upgrading it all the more difficult.

In order to meet changing customer needs, stay ahead of the competition and give the organization true agility, business transformation is necessary, and there are a few different triggers that can steer a business towards transformation: 

  1. A change in external factors, such as new regulations, unavailability of funding sources or change in the income flow of the company.
  2. A change in internal factors such as marketing required for newly developed products or a business outgrowing their management skills.
  3. To deliver newly identified customer demands or after observing market disruption. In such cases, businesses need new goals and strategies to match advances in technology.
  4. Outdated systems and technology could require more costs compared to new alternatives by slowing down work pace. Slow systems can make the job more challenging for employees and reduces productivity. Therefore, it’s important to update these areas, reduce costs and improve the motivation of employees with business transformation. 

The technological challenges

Business transformation isn’t going to happen overnight. What’s more, without employee and company-wide buy-in, it’s not going to be a success. So the first step in transforming a business is ensuring that everyone is involved in the journey. Not only does this help to break down data and departmental silos, but it will better manage change throughout the organization.

There’s also a growing demand for cloud-native enterprise software along with the general shift from on-premise technology to SaaS and cloud in order to elevate businesses. While cloud-native applications come with storage and hosting benefits, the cloud opens up a number of possibilities through its reliability, scalability and on-demand nature. 

Yet migrating to the cloud or replatforming current solutions can’t be undertaken lightly, and so IT professionals will need to assess their business needs carefully to determine how such a project is undertaken and whether the switch will benefit the business in the long-term. 

A composable architecture model may be the perfect solution to transforming at speed and provide longevity for the business, but the challenges of switching legacy systems can be tricky, especially when the infrastructure becomes more complicated. Therefore, it’s important for organizations to take into consideration the monitoring, fault isolation, security and management issues this type of transformation could create.

Why should businesses look to MACH technologies?

Many modern organizations have implemented data-driven digital solutions across departments. They need to interpret and act on the available data within their organization to gain insight into customer relationships. 

In the world of digital transformation, a MACH approach is becoming increasingly popular. Implementing a MACH architecture means organizations can put data and technology as a top priority, but they’ll require organizational as well as technological change in order for it to be successful. 

But why should businesses consider MACH architecture as part of their business transformation?:

An omnichannel experience

MACH’s headless approach eliminates channel silos and delivers a connected customer journey across both traditional and digital touchpoints. New business models are also easy to introduce, meaning additional sales channels can help to drive new revenue growth without impacting core operations. 

Seamless integration

Connecting multiple systems via APIs provides organizations with the ability to share data easily between applications. It’s also easier to implement APIs, reduces time-to-market and creates a unified logic across touchpoints to prevent the duplication of development work. 

Embracing innovation

The modular approach of MACH architecture can help businesses to innovate and experiment with new services which can be done by gradually replacing one system at a time from the old architecture. MACH technology also gives the development team the ability to make quick alterations and avoid the hassle of changing the architecture from scratch.

Greater agility

The use of microservices allows organizations to build a custom solution for their specific needs. Not only is this great for cost optimization, but it also enables companies to pivot to changing market conditions and customer demands.

Business continuity 

Leveraging cloud-native applications ensure that services remain online across multiple data centers and availability zones. This reduces potential revenue losses and maximizes up-time. Due to the use of microservices, application errors only impact the independent component, allowing the rest of the system to function as normal. Monolithic platforms restrict the organization’s ability to address rapidly changing demands. A MACH architecture unlocks business transformation and offers a best-of-breed solution. This technology not only provides the building blocks of digital business transformation, but also helps continuous evolution in the future. 

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