Nowadays, digital transformation is paramount for any business to remain competitive in the market. Given the predominant macroeconomic environment, more and more businesses will likely continue experiencing rough challenges and opportunities to promote and sustain in 2023. Amidst heavy inflation and economic uncertainty, companies should address issues on multiple fronts, covering the supply chain, demanding customer expectations, and sustainability.

Digital transformation is expected to help businesses remain relevant and preserve sustained revenue models. However, what the modern businesses should prioritize stepping into 2023? Today everything is about building speed, boosting innovation and agility across operations and functions. Since customer demands change rapidly, companies should drive growth and successfully navigate the disruption. Eventually, digital transformation is more than a technology. Instead, the shift in mindset enables leaders to reimagine business models and processes to benefit from all emerging technologies.

What are the trends?

1) Accelerating the Development of Complex Business Applications

First of all, business leaders should understand that digital transformation is ground for much more than designing simple applications or automating departmental processes. As per Gartner, it is expected for the app demand to grow five times faster, but most companies still face difficulties when looking for technical talent.

To address this issue, there is significant growth in low-code platforms, which can aim companies develop company-wide applications more quickly. Digital transformation is more likely to focus on fast-developing business apps that can secure ultimate customer experiences, boost operational excellence, and adopt business innovation.

Customers, employees, and other stakeholders are highly interested in establishing and lending business processes. As a result, such enterprise-wide apps can connect the front and back ends by leveraging seamless automation and integration with the help of multiple ecosystems to deliver an excellent customer experience.

2) Maximizing Operational Efficiency through Continuous Improvement

Given the ongoing economic slowdown, the business’ next priority is reaching operational efficiency to ensure cost savings. Still, many companies choose digital transformation services to streamline their operations and stay competitive in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. The analysis of the disturbingly low success rate of digital transformation initiatives and solutions after the Covid-19 pandemic showcased that companies have concentrated on digitalizing and automating front-end functionality to ensure a smooth customer experience. In addition, they completely disregarded the big picture thinking, which covers the middle and back offices in charge of the primary workload. Eventually, companies face broken customer experiences due to process friction and emerging bottlenecks in operations.

To prevent this, companies will highly prioritize automation of the middle and back-office layers by proactively leveraging process automation technologies and robotic process automation. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance process improvement by offering data-driven insights to eliminate redundancies and bottlenecks.

Digitalizing policy servicing in, for example, an insurance company includes dealing with numerous service requests related to finance, claims, administration, etc. This process requires efficient processing across different departments, covering underwriting, claims, billing, and administration. By integrating all the underlying systems through an orchestration layer in a low-code automation platform, combined with contextual content services and customer communication, a unified and streamlined employee experience can be achieved. This results in improved operational efficiency and significant cost savings for the company.

3) Mastering Data and Content Management

According to IDC forecast, by 2025, up to 80% of global data will be unstructured. In order to effectively handle data that may come in various forms, such as scanned documents, emails, audio and video files, and MS Office files, low-code platforms must be integrated with content services and communication management capabilities. This integration can lead to various benefits, such as:

-          Rapid access to information anytime

-          Effective document discovery

-          Improved collaboration and process automation

-          Expanded document generation capabilities

-          Secure cloud-hosted content

4) Streamlining the Application Portfolio for Improved Efficiency

Companies will take a competitive edge by getting leaner and more efficient. Traditional business models that rely on multiple applications often lead to technical inconsistencies and application governance risks for the IT team. Although core and backend systems will continue to be crucial for insurance companies, banks, and manufacturers. They will also require a digital orchestration layer to streamline functions and processes and provide a unified interface for better employee and customer experiences. This minimizes the need for multiple applications for specific functions and eliminates silos. Therefore, this leads to reduced costs and improved application management.

Conclusion

2023 will certainly become another exciting year, with technology driving value. This cultivating technological supremacy requires businesses to stay on top of the trends to expand new business opportunities. Technologies like low-code, process automation, AI,  RPA, and content services will help companies become more sustainable, automate end-to-end processes, boost performance, and secure a superior customer experience.