Industry after industry is under siege as companies embrace digital transformation (DX) to disrupt existing business models and disintermediate their competitor's customer relationships. But what do we mean by "Digital Transformation"?

Digital Transformation
The coupling of granular, real-time data (e.g., smartphones, connected devices, smart appliances, wearables, mobile commerce, video surveillance) with modern technologies (e.g., cloud native apps, Big Data architectures, hyper-converged technologies, artificial intelligence, blockchain) to enhance products, processes, and business-decision making with customer, product and operational insights.

In order to achieve digital transformation, organizations need to coordinate and align the following business and technology capabilities:

• Build out the organization's data and analytics capabilities and assets (e.g., data science, analytic profiles, data lake with data management services, analytic and data integration tools) that provide the foundation for uncovering the customer, product, and operational insights that enable the organization's top priority business initiatives.
• Embed analytic insights and evidence-based recommendations into cloud-native applications that enable customers, partners/channels, front-line employees and line-of-business managers to optimize processes and business decisions and learn from customer and market engagements.
• Incorporate the breadth of the organization's digital footprint with Internet of Things (e.g., sensors, beacons, mobile phones, wearables, connected devices) to enable real-time and near-real time operational and product performance optimization that further enhances business decision-making and extends more value to customers/consumers.
• Enhance and protect the organization's data, analytic and application development assets with data management, security and authentication services.

The digital transformation starts by understanding the organization's business initiatives, and then prioritizing which initiatives are top candidates for enhancement through digital transformation. "Begin with an end in mind" to quote Stephen Covey.

Organizations can then create a digital transformation roadmap that dictates how the organization leverages data, analytics (data science) and application development capabilities to deliver cloud-native "intelligent" applications (applications embedded with machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize key processes and business decisions) and "smart" entities (that leverage the edge, fog and core IoT analytics to support the creation of "learning" business entities such as cities, cars, airports, hospitals, utilities and schools (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Digital Transformation Components

In the end, digital transformation helps organizations become more effective in leveraging data and analytics to power their business models by optimizing key business processes, reducing security risks, uncovering new revenue opportunities and create a more compelling customer engagement and creating a more compelling, more prescriptive customer engagement (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Big Data Business Model Maturity Index

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