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What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation involves building digital technologies into an organization's products, processes, and strategies, with the goal of improving customer experience, boosting employee and customer engagement, and improving competitiveness.
When digital transformation is successful, it can deliver long-term benefits. Digital technologies and processes enable organizations to better respond to changing customer needs. Digital transformation also builds the infrastructure and skills needed to take advantage of opportunities in the modern, digital economy. A digital transformation strategy helps organizations survive and compete in a world where technology is a key economic driver.
In this article:
- Digital Transformation Use Cases
- Digital Transformation in Specific Industries
- Cloud Transformation with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Digital Transformation Use Cases
Here are a few ways digital transformation can impact an organization:
- Improve customer experience—digital technologies can improve existing customer interactions, make a product or service more attractive to digital-first consumers, and create new forms of customer interaction that can improve outcomes.
- Make operations more efficient—digital technology can improve business processes, save costs, and allow businesses to leverage automation. It also introduces the use of big data analytics for improved decision making.
- Improve collaboration—digital technology enables employees, contractors and customers to collaborate across geographical locations in ways that were not previously possible, using technologies like video conferencing, cloud file sharing, and media repositories.
- Improve agility—digital transformation allows businesses to innovate faster and rapidly evolve business processes, products and services in response to new market requirements. It also reduces the cost and complexity of rapid business growth.
- Introduce new products and services—digital technology allows organizations to rethink their products and markets and introduce new offerings that can disrupt the market by offering new benefits to consumers.
Digital Transformation in Specific Industries
Digital Transformation in Banking
Banks of all sizes are struggling to fully embrace new technologies and services. The digital transformation of the banking industry primarily involves the transition to online and digital service delivery and the extensive back-office changes required to support this transition.
One of the most important aspects of banking digital transformation is the ability to adapt to change. Banks are constrained by security and compliance frameworks designed to protect customer data and privacy—these frameworks can inhibit change.
Banks are facing tough competition from new digital banking solutions and financial applications, which outperform them in terms of growth and customer acquisition. Digital transformation can help banks respond to changing customer needs, adopt new technologies, and balance between internal policies, compliance requirements, and the evolution of the financial services market.
Examples of digital transformation in banks:
- Adopting mobile banking applications and mobile payments.
- Adopting blockchain technology.
- Applying analytics to customer data and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for cross-sell, up-sell, and customer experience improvements.
Digital Transformation in Healthcare
Digital transformation is having a huge impact on the healthcare industry. In the US alone, the digital healthcare market will be worth $1.5 trillion by 2030.
The transformation of digital healthcare today enables a patient-centric approach. This allows healthcare providers and institutions to make operations more efficient, while targeting and personalizing service for patients, ensuring a better user experience and improved health outcomes.
The process of collecting, storing, and accessing data via digital communications has proven to be highly beneficial in healthcare settings. The ability to access patient information is an essential part of providing personalized service.
Healthcare organizations are investing in scalable, flexible technologies, such as APIs, big data analytics, and cloud technologies. All these are needed to access data and provide patients with personalized solutions.
Examples of digital transformation in the healthcare industry include:
- Analyzing patient data and identifying patterns that can help define personalized treatment plans for groups of patients
- Improving security using innovative technologies like blockchain and encryption
- Leveraging telemedicine technologies to improve customer experience and improve access to medical treatment for disadvantaged populations
Digital Transformation in Retail
The COVID-19 pandemic increased the transition from physical retail to eCommerce and mobile commerce. The retail industry is having to accelerate digitization and rethink business models. Retailers are discovering innovative ways to increase revenue online, which requires multiple aspects of digital transformation.
When deciding to go digital, retailers are considering how to generate revenue with new technologies. Big data analytics, location-based services and mobile applications have transformed the way retailers do business.
Digital tools and technologies are impacting on the way retailers:
- Market and sell products and services
- Organize internal workflows to increase efficiencies and streamline processes
- Improve consumer engagement, retention, and satisfaction
- Use data intelligence to improve customer focus and identify new value propositions
- Transform sourcing and inventory management
- Improve workforce management and training
- Introduce customer experience management
- Serve customer, improving customer experience by enabling shopping via digital devices
- Respond to customer needs and market changes
Digital Transformation in Manufacturing
Digital transformation in the manufacturing industry is having a major impact on manufacturers, suppliers, customers, and other third parties. Digital technologies help manufacturers improve operational efficiencies and optimize all areas of their business, from product development to the supply chain.
The digital transformation of manufacturing means augmenting existing manufacturing processes, products and people with digital technologies such as data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), automation software, eCommerce integration, connected sensors, and improved industrial robotics.
These advanced manufacturing technologies can help companies tap into new digital business models, and adapt quickly to change.
The goals of digital transformation in manufacturing are to:
- Increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs
- Improve product quality through improved analytics in manufacturing processes
- Improving customer experience, for example by simplifying the ordering process
- Leverage data-driven decision-making
- Improving agility and quickly responding to customer needs and market changes
Digital Transformation in Education
In education, digital transformation or schools and universities can benefit students, faculty, and graduates, allow educational institutions to provide a better student experience, improve their ability to attract and retain students, and support the transition to distance learning. In addition, digital transformation is helping organizations adapt to the “new normal” created by the COVID-19 pandemic, providing new and innovative remote learning options.
All educational systems rely on data collection and processing. There is a strong need for big data and analytics technologies to provide personalized educational solutions, generate deeper insights into student learning, and facilitate better teacher-student interactions.
Automation can ease the burden of administrative and operational tasks on teachers and school administrators. There are digital solutions for almost every aspect of education management, including recruitment, attendance management, and parent notification.
Digital transformation can improve the student experience by:
- Improving enrollment and self-service administration through online interfaces
- Allowing students to learn through mobile apps or web applications
- Augmenting in-person learning with online learning options
- Using technology to track student progress and provide personalized intervention
- Enabling organization and management of online classrooms
Cloud Transformation with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Cloud computing is at the core of digital transformation, elevating it from the adoption stage of digital technology to include also the tools, rebuilding process, and the experience of a virtual environment that is accessible from anywhere. In order for an organization to achieve its goals and secure future viability, it needs to adopt a cloud-first or hybrid cloud management strategy.
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, and it supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.
NetApp and Cloud Volumes ONTAP play a key role in the cloud transformation process, helping enterprises move workloads and data to the cloud securely, manage them efficiently, and integrate them with modern cloud technologies. This frees the organizations from the burden of managing large-scale storage infrastructure and allows them to focus on their core business.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP assists with cloud migration in digital transformation projects. Learn more about how Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps with lift and shift cloud migration.
Read our case studies showing how Cloud Volume ONTAP is helping the following industries in their cloud journey:
