In today’s economic environment, businesses are under constant pressure to secure growth amidst rising costs and increased competition. While technology can offer many transformative opportunities in the digital economy, hurdles like budget constraints, a widening IT skills gap, and cybersecurity threats still need to be overcome.
As we look at building digital transformation strategies for 2019, here are three trends to keep top of mind.
Addressing the skills gap
Talent shortage is one of the biggest issues that businesses face in their quest for digital transformation. It’s one thing to put a job ad up for data scientist, but there just aren’t enough to go around.
While Australia has taken significant steps in fostering vital STEM skills in schools and educational institutes, the onus is on businesses to take steps promptly in order to future proof themselves.
An alternative to this is to engage with partners that can shoulder the technical burden. This allows businesses to focus on the sustainable and high-value aspects of the business – acting as strategic technology advisors for their customers and focusing their efforts on high-value work. This also has the side benefit of improving employee retention, whilst empowering existing staff to identify new revenue opportunities, improve internal processes, and more.
Securing digital data
2018 has been a jarring year for data security, with an unprecedented number of cybersecurity incidents and data breaches. From the recent breach with PageUp in Australia to Facebook’s security breach that exposed the accounts of over 50 million users, it’s evident that a lot of businesses have been caught unprepared.
The prominence of such incidents in the media has meant that consumers are more concerned about their privacy than ever before. To obtain new customers and retain their existing ones, businesses need to demonstrate that they can be trusted with sensitive information with resilient cybersecurity measures and robust internal infrastructures.
The recent introduction of the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in Australia has also elevated digital data onto the national agenda. Transparency in the industry is sorely needed in order to promote consumer trust and accountability.
Embracing the cloud as a new way of working
A recent study from Gartner projected the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 17.3 percent in 2019 to a total of US$206.2 billion. In comparison, the market was valued at US$175.8 billion in 2018. There is no doubt that cloud computing will be the next big thing in the enterprise technology sector, enabling new ways of working through the opportunities that both desktop and software virtualisation brings to the table.
Empowering employees with the latest technologies has the dual advantage of promoting efficiency and employee engagement; workers are empowered and feel valued within the organisation.
As organisations look to prepare for a digital future, business leaders need to remember that digital skills and rising technologies is no replacement for genuine innovation. In order to be successful in their respective fields, businesses need to foster a culture of innovation where employees are encouraged to think creatively.
