Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 23 | Page 25

E EAS DL ID AL I O N E L S G E R ANN CH DLE E Successful availability of data across the entire customer experience and business supply chain will give organisations the confidence to open up their inventory. This may include data from open data platforms maintained by national government agencies such as weather, population demographics, urban statistics, vehicular movements as well as open data repositories from global agencies. By building correlations between their own data and other third-party data sources, organisations will better model customer behaviour and responses in a predictive manner, yielding better return on investments and net new revenue sources. Successful availability of data across the entire customer experience and business supply chain will give organisations the confidence to open up their inventory and delivery in a real time manner to suppliers, partners and end-customers. As suppliers, partners and end-customers get access to not only current levels of product and stock availability but also future levels in a predictive manner, they will also begin to engage in a more proactive manner. This enhanced level of supply INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 23 chain forecasting with predictive demand levels, combined with ERP, CRM, Artificial Intelligence, robotics and automation, promises to be one of the exciting new trends in 2019. Automation using robotic processes will drive huge gains across 2019 as Machine Learning, neural networks and Artificial Intelligence are progressively added to the complete end to end of business processes. Geographical compliance challenges coupled with market behaviour will be a key driver for the adoption of more and more automation driving predictive behaviour of demand levels for a product or service. Other drivers for the adoption of robotic process automation will be the ability to reduce costs of operation, enhanced support levels for customer demands and ability to deliver personalised experiences effectively. As organisations begin to make progress in their Digital Transformation exercise in 2019, another key learning and realisation for them will be the availability of prebuilt digital technology services, frameworks and platforms. As much as possible, Digital Transformation adopters need to reach out and access service partners who have prepared such tools and building blocks for them. There is little need for such organisations dabbling in the early stages of Digital Transformation to start building the blocks themselves or start tackling the complexities of creating such platforms. It is far easier to leave the challenges and complexities of building and managing the digital technology components of 2019 to vendors and their service partners and focus on making progress in the organisation’s Digital Transformation objectives. Organisations adopting an active role of buying-in managed technology services, will find themselves making accelerated progress in their journeys. They will also find it easier to invest and build scale around pre-tested, compliant and secure platforms, that are reliable building blocks for their onward transformation journeys. Success in 2019 appears to be more predictive than before. ˜ 25