What is digital transformation?

The goal of digital transformation is to increase the speed of applications and services deployment, simplify and enhance the customer experience, and provide access to more information more quickly.

A strong digital platform is the most fundamental technology foundation. Organizations need to standardize platforms with consistent design and architecture, securely and within budget. It’s a complex challenge to modernize data centers with near end-of-life infrastructures and large proprietary legacy hardware devices.

To tackle digital transformation, an organization must combine strong leadership with digital activity. Thinking differently is a crucial piece of digital transformation; leaders must have the willingness to change, and a vision of how to transform their company to grow and thrive in a digital world.

Key Areas for Digital Transformation

• Customer Experience: (most visible aspect of digital transformation) Use of digital media and social media, and building analytics capabilities to understand details of what makes customers happy to drive customer behavior towards purchase or use of services. Digital transformation can enhance customer service as well as the sales experience.
• Operations: Automation is essential when moving towards digital transformation for a company’s operations and processes, and cost reductions. Combined together, network automation, open architectures, telemetry, machine learning, and programming with declarative intent, create an autonomous network that is predictive and adaptive to its environment, called the Self-Driving Network™.
• Business Models:
  • Service Providers: Want to diversify revenue coming from monthly broadband subscription (network access, bandwidth, and content) models to becoming enablers of digital transformation by leveraging the cloud in every aspect of the network. To be effective in the market, they need to achieve digital transformation before they can provide and monetize digital service offerings to their customers.
  • Enterprises: Are transitioning to hybrid IT, resulting in distributed applications, workloads, and increasing use of containers. Digital transformation is enabled by public clouds providing network, bandwidth, and connectivity capabilities that inter-connect data centers within the cloud. As enterprise workloads are distributed across on-premise, and public and private clouds become more agile, enterprises need smart solutions with built-in security intelligence that can self-heal, be proactive, and correlate events.

There is a standard approach to digital transformation. There are constraints in terms of adoption, but having the willingness and mindset to change, together with the underlying infrastructure (of both people and networks) is key to making this happen.