Top Transformation Champions: Creating meaningful value for customers

The economies, communities, and long-term viability of the Middle East are all being significantly impacted by digital. Regional entrepreneurs view the scale and speed of digital business transformation or DBT as both dangerous and exciting.

Digital transformation is fundamentally about both organisational and technological change. Regional enterprises in the retail, real estate, travel and tourism, manufacturing, and healthcare industries in the region have been able to strike the right balance to successfully adopt digital and business transformation solutions.

Today, digital transformation has come a long way from being a buzzword to becoming imperative for business success. However, its failures continue to plague businesses. Most digital initiatives sputter before they take full effect due to several reasons, including lack of transformation goals, absence of a change management strategy and internal resistance. It is also impacted by the pace of change and poor adoption of new technologies.

Nevertheless, enterprises can take control and overturn the situation in the near to medium term with the right discipline and focus. Organisations can also leverage four key transformations while adopting digital technologies. These include process transformation, business model transformation, domain transformation, and cultural or organisational transformation.

Adopting new software, technology, and processes is just one aspect of digital transformation; organisations need to adopt a completely fresh, cutting-edge approach to doing something that is core to the business.

Lack of change management strategy, however, will continue to remain a challenge for the senior management of enterprises. The complexity of software and subsequent driving of the same technology, new tools and the process can raise concerns for the management to tackle without a digital transformation strategy in place.

The absence of proper IT skills, security concerns and budget constraints may also need to be solved by the top executives.

Transformation of business processes with technology and adoption of innovative business models is crucial for successful transformation. Also, one of the main contributors to successful digital transformation is the cultural transformation of the organisation.

Instilling collaboration into the system to empower employees and make them more agile as well as presenting them with growth opportunities is key to leveraging the benefits of the transformation.

The B2B sector is being dominated by emerging technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality. Edge computing will streamline the process of getting closer to cloud-like processing capacity with fewer latency difficulties, along with other predicted changes in the automotive and robotic sectors.

A much more realistic consumer experience for anything from fashion and technology to art will be made possible by the metaverse. It is understandable how one would think such cutting-edge technology may make cities and other physical areas obsolete. However, the truth is that this metaverse, like every significant previous wave of the invention before it, complements locality rather than replaces it.

Physical location will become a crucial component of an enterprise, especially due to the future’s dependency on the availability of advanced IT infrastructure. To attract and connect talent, businesses will need to think more strategically than ever before about where to locate their offices and innovation hubs, where to locate their retail locations to draw in customers and increase brand awareness, and more generally how to balance their physical and digital footprints.

The relationship between sustainability, technology, and business is a synergistic one. Resilience and sustainability performance must be included in business performance measurement for regional enterprises as well.

Businesses must move quickly to use technology that can reduce carbon emissions and hasten the transition to a circular economy. They have the power to promote sustainability not only internally but also throughout the broader industry ecosystem. They can affect the wider supply chain and offer their clients eco-friendly alternatives.

Companies can promote sustainability not only along their supply chains but also throughout the entire geographic scope of their operations by leveraging their economic weight and industry knowledge to create awareness, disseminate information, and introduce the technology needed to support sustainable business.

Key takeaways

• Digital transformation is fundamentally about both organisational and technological change
• Entrepreneurs view the scale and speed of digital business transformation as both dangerous and exciting.
• The B2B sector is dominated by emerging technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality.
• Edge computing can help organisations get cloud-like processing capacity with fewer latency issues.
• Technologies can enable businesses to reduce carbon emissions and hasten the transition to a circular economy.