Using industry ecosystems to accelerate the future of digital transformation
Morne de Villiers: Integration Architect and Project Manager at TechSoft International
As South African business owners know, harnessing the potential of different ecosystems is essential to enabling flexibility and scalability in an organisation. Enabling this is the adoption of advanced technologies. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that the IDC’s 2022 Worldwide CEO Survey has found that nearly 88% of CEOs planned to have either sustained or increased their technology spending this year.
It has become clear that if a company is not already leveraging digital intelligence, then it has fallen behind industry standards. Now more than ever, businesses realise the need for digital prediction and data insights to help transform decision-making with technology. Of course, this shift is not specific to any industry. It has become prevalent across all sectors, especially banking, energy, and healthcare.
Events of the past two years have highlighted the need for companies to be prepared for anything. They must be capable of adapting to any disruption regardless of its origin. Technology becomes the cornerstone on which to build this readiness. It injects a level of agility into organisational processes that traditional systems cannot do.
Regardless of industry, digital changes are happening all around us. The secret to success today is to optimise digital transformation through industry ecosystems. This comes down to amplifying partner success with technology-led innovation.
Continued transformation
As organisations enter the next phase of digital transformation, they must consider several aspects that enable them to meet the industry demands that constantly changing markets are putting on them.
At the core of this is having a digital-first business. In the past several years, companies have navigated economic downturns, supply chain disruptions, inflation, global pandemics, and many other political and social disruptions. Of course, disasters that can impact business are never completely avoidable, but they can be mitigated if leaders are prepared. Digital transformation is essential for a business to truly become digital-first and be more responsive to these disruptions.
But what are the industry ecosystems that can play a role in facilitating this change in approach?
First and foremost, a digital ecosystem is just a term to describe a community of complex segments such as software ecosystems, industry ecosystems, and business ecosystems. These translate to having an open and trusted way of working around shared data and insights, shared applications, and shared operational expertise.
This is enabled by a blended physical and digital way of innovating and collaborating between participants in this environment. It also includes how an organisation communicates and collaborates with different partners and its customers.
Participants in an industry ecosystem are a mix of private, public, and industry entities such as business networks, expert forums, government organisations, supply chains, and foundational cloud services. Of course, organisations need to leverage various advanced technologies to enable the realisation of this industry ecosystem. These technologies include cyber security, the blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital twins, data integration, and business process orchestration.
Delivering scale
Building from these concepts of becoming a digital-first business and enabling industry ecosystems is the ability to create connected enterprise intelligence to scale.
Think of it as how ecosystem intelligence and interconnected data will help accelerate the next phase of digital transformation. Companies that become digital-first enable a reliable data flow with analytics and decision support tools across all domains or industry ecosystems. Data governance creates a trusted, shared stream of bi-directional data that empowers applications, operations, and innovation. All these are critical for growth in today’s fast-moving world.
When an organisation has intelligent ecosystems and partners, it is multiplying the productivity of its solutions. A diverse partner ecosystem, therefore, becomes the catalyst for maintaining focus on driving scale, innovation and exceeding customer demands and expectations.
Industry applications
Putting this into practice looks different for every industry sector.
A financial advisory, for example, will turn towards creating a single domain master data management solution. This will enable the acceleration of accurate governance of master data, reference data, and metadata.
In the energy sector, integration and analytics solutions can provide more comprehensive insights into the utility journey and need to encompass a real-time view of all internal and external communication. Through this, energy providers can oversee regulatory requirements with API and business process management. Executives can then use, monitor, and make data-driven actions to address sudden market shifts. Given the vagaries of South Africa’s electricity infrastructure, being adaptive to rapid change for any organisation is a business necessity.
In healthcare, the practical application of digital-first and intelligent ecosystems could look even more different. For instance, a consulting firm specialising in data-centric healthcare solutions can create a way for its customers to better connect community members with the local and regional medical providers and resources using just one hub. With such a solution in place, people can access care via a user-friendly mobile application regardless of where they are. Referral tracking integrates important data to ensure care providers and all other relevant stakeholders have a unified view of treatment campaigns.
The importance of ecosystems will become increasingly apparent as more South African companies build on the digital transformation efforts they have already put in place.