It’s true that a lot of chatter these days are about digital transformation – alongside keywords like agility, resilience, fast-paced, efficiency, or optimization. While not taking away the fact that these are outcomes that organizations should achieve when deploying technology to adapt to today’s advanced landscape, however, we can all recognize that it doesn’t get easier for enterprises trying to keep up with technological investments or learning the ropes of an evolving digital journey…
One might ask – what is the hype around digital transformation that is leaving businesses no choice but to integrate and even accelerate within their business models? That’s a fair question, considering that transformation is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but to be customized according to the organization’s own ecosystem and challenges. To strip away complex definitions, digital transformation is about making a fundamental change to your organization’s infrastructure, operations and processes, and workplace culture so that you become an agile business that can ably thrive in a competitive, dynamic landscape and not fall behind current market needs.
Ultimately, an agile business is a critical business imperative today, as agility helps to:
- Counter the risks of a developing macro-environment without losing out on productivity;
- Ensure business continuity against rising cyber threats while delivering profitability; and
- Foster trust with your customers through compliance and security.
As an organization, where and how do you start transforming so that you drive an agile business that is also resilient and robust in parallel to market changes while withstanding internal and external pressures? This is my two cents.
Present challenges and next steps
One of the biggest issues facing enterprises today is with unifying their disparate digital ecosystem to enable a fully integrated and seamless experience for customers and employees. Therefore, it is crucial to get your infrastructure transformation right from the get-go, starting with a trusted and experienced consultative partner-vendor, to avoid future issues. A unified and centralized ecosystem is key to driving an agile business with desired outcomes, as it takes an ecosystem of technologies that work well together.
For many enterprises, there are also legacy applications that require them to be rearchitected and standardized to a modern and secure environment to adapt to changing times. By drawing up a robust plan and understanding your overarching business strategy, you can identify your organization’s major pain points and offer strategic use cases to be implemented - ultimately supporting overall productivity, security, and greater flexibility. Without a transformation plan or strategy in place, it would be challenging to achieve an agile business model that can pivot easily and stay relevant.
As any technological or infrastructure upgrades involve several moving parts that may be deployed in phases, it would be beneficial to know your own budget and resources to prioritize the kind of investments and cost required for your undertaking. Involving your IT teams and the business departments in a joint decision-making approach to ensure alignment on infrastructure financing and available funding with new business needs, is crucial as part of the transformation roadmap.
To complete the puzzle piece, organizations also need to look into improving cross-departmental collaboration for teams to succeed in this digital market. Internal silos need to be broken down for a relationship-focused approach to drive effective customer relations and other external stakeholders. A mindset change must be instilled organization-wide so that the old ways of doing things can be refreshed and replaced by a work culture that is attuned to market needs and innovative with ideas and solutions to address problems faced by customers.
Conclusion
It must be said time and again that a powerful and flexible enough network serves as an important foundation to render the business agility, security, visibility, and efficiency – particularly as network accessibility becomes even more in demand by virtue of distributed operations and workforce embracing work at anytime, anywhere, and on any device. A network-native digital integrator company like Orange Business brings to the table our technical expertise as network operator, combined with the agility of an integrator in digital solutions.
By leveraging our holistic, vendor-agnostic approach to integrate innovative technologies with an organization’s existing environment in a sustainable manner, Orange Business empowers the networks of organizations with robust agility, greater resilience with reduced outage risks (for example, by adopting a modern SD-WAN network or Secure Service Edge i.e. SSE that reduces network complexity and addresses security requirements at scale), as well as cost optimization or reduction (for example, by rightsizing your connectivity needs and lowering OPEX or CAPEX maintenance when you migrate to the cloud).
Whether it’s a technical assessment of your infrastructure performance that you like to know more or a support outreach you wish to contact, Orange Business is here to help!
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Edmund is the General Manager of Orange Business Hong Kong and Taiwan. He is responsible for developing and managing our portfolio of business solutions for multinational enterprises and provides strategic direction to support the growth of Orange Business as the leading integrated communications provider in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Edmund likes having a whisky or two during his down time to unwind when he is not driving.