What Digitization Can Do To Enhance Your Data

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MohantyIn this special guest feature, Soumendra Mohanty of Mindtree reflects on the process of digitization that companies undergo to meet the needs of the digital consumer. Soumendra Mohanty is Vice President, Global Data and Analytics at Mindtree. Soumendra is a thought leader and an authority within the information management, business intelligence (BI), big data and analytics area having written several books and published articles in leading journals in the data and analytics space.

In the past, airlines served customers by simply getting them from gate to gate. Yet, today’s connected traveler expects a single, seamless experience that gets them from home to hotel and back. Meeting this expectation requires complex communication among numerous parties and systems from ground transportation to hotel services and that is just the start of the technical complexity companies must take on.

The connected world – customers, products, services and businesses, is constructed around the convergence of social, mobile, and web. In other words, digital transformation and organizations are considering building big changes around it. Some organizations may remain reticent to taking this step. Their established business practices serve them well and they have a strong market position with a suite of mature offerings. Why would they want to change that winning formula? Because it’s 2015. Digital transformation is about meeting the needs of the digital consumer.

To begin with, an organization needs to have a clear strategy for how it intends to utilize digital. This strategy needs to be tied to broader business objectives and customer needs. It should adapt to changing business circumstances and establish policies with which digital operates.

Digitization enhances the value of your data. The rapid expansion of big data means you’ve got more data about customers in more places than ever before, but more data doesn’t make it easier to develop a composite picture of the customer.

As a result, many companies are rethinking their approach to traditional enterprise storage and architecture to leverage big data. Storing and managing these huge pools of information is a challenge for many enterprises, but big data also offers significant opportunities.

Businesses are now faced with building comprehensive, connected data systems to understand customer behavior, map customer journeys and redefine them to create not only delightful experiences but also get into a sense-and-respond paradigm. This is one of the important characteristics of a digital enterprise – an enterprise with a data platforms that champion the cause of stitching together disparate data to develop a customer insight data repository.

In addition, a recent report from Forrester, describes a future where cloud-enabled business networks deliver an ease of engagement never before seen in traditional business-to-business (B2B) collaboration solutions. According to Forrester, these networks enable business collaboration by sharing data in real time on a single cloud platform based on trust relationship models rather than by mapping and exchanging B2B data. As industry boundaries continue to blur and multiple relationships are increasingly required to create value, this business network capability will manage increased collaboration complexity and make every relationship more effective.

As a best case scenario – the connected digital experience will look something like this: A grocery chain collects data from your shopping, social, and other connected behaviors, combines it with sensor data from smart-connected devices and analyzes it to understand your eating and shopping habits. It can then identify when you’re headed to the store, calculate that it’s been a while since you made chili and guess you might be in the mood. And through mobile and wearables devices, offers you the right-time promotions for chili ingredients and even helps you navigate the stores to find what you need. A store employee enabled with a tablet, a smart watch or a wearable device can extend the experience to a physical touch point by catching you at the register with and ingredient you missed. Pretty remarkable, but not simple.

That kind of powerful digital example builds on the momentum of data leading to outcome enabling insights. Of course with digital transformation there is more to come as technologies in the space of social, mobile, cloud, big data, etc. are each experimenting with newer concepts and approaches every time, as these technologies evolve rapidly.

 

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  1. Ingrid S says

    How can data stored on external party servers be 100% secure? Binfer does not store files anywhere. It is a better “cloudless” way to share data securely. See cloudless sharing.