Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 23 | Page 24

MID E EAS DL ID AL I O N E L S G E R ANN CH DLE E While organisations will relook at their structure and job roles to enable successful Digital Transformation across 2019, other key activity areas will be automation of customer experiences and the supply chain, explains Paul Potgieter, Managing Director – UAE, Dimension Data. TRANSFORMATION AND AUTOMATION HAND IN HAND ACROSS 2019 A 24 the organisation around customer data, innovative experiences, revamped business processes and redesigned job roles. This will help the organisation to move forward rather than face resistance, similar to fitting a square peg into a round hole. Other than organisational structure, another area that will need a revamp in 2019 will be the approach around generating, accessing and analysing customer data. Organisations beginning their Digital Transformation exercise will quickly realise that they have a lot of data that they do not need, and very little data that they do need, to begin their journey into understanding customer insights. Organisations will need to build new processes to generate the data that they do need and also build new structures to aid in the analysis of that data. In order to build their repositories of insightful and valuable, customer centric data across 2019, organisations will be successful this time around by investing in the Internet of Things. By investing in sensors, devices, applications, connected core and edge networks, across entire business processes and supply chains, organisations will begin to realise how to generate their return on investments through customer data aggregation and analytics. Not only will organisations be more successful in 2019 by investing in the Internet of Things, for their own data analytics, but they will also begin to see the value in blending into their data, repositories from third party data sources. s organisations get moving on the Digital Transformation road map, they may abruptly find themselves running more on a bumpy dirt track rather than a Formula One race course with expected high-speed pit-stops. The lessons from this experience are sometimes hard to accept. One of the key reasons for the bumpy track is that existing organisational structures are often incompatible with the requirements of delivering digital experiences to customers. Organisations need to take a deep breath and start relooking at their structure from the point of view of the customer rather than traditional departmental silos and legacy job functions. One of the key changes likely to happen across 2019 is that organisations moving down the path of Digital Transformation will restructure to bring in flexibility so that they can refocus on what the customer wants. Digital technologies will be leveraged to enhance the customer experience and project teams will work together to rebuild et er , M an ta agi Da ng D s i on n irector e – UAE, Dim