A new year brings new technology resolutions. While it goes by many names, like upgrading infrastructure or improving operations, digital transformation remains a high priority. Following are eight resolutions—and the trends behind them—to help guide your digital transformation initiatives in 2023.
Digital Transformation Definition
Digital transformation is not simply infrastructure changes; instead, digital transformation applies the tools of technology to enhance or build new business processes, culture, and customer experiences. It’s about revisiting business strategies to ensure competitive advantage and capacity for delivering maximum value to customers using current and emerging technology.
Additionally, digital transformation is about reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions for sustainability. In technology, sustainability is about more efficient operational resources. Data centers and server farms account for 1 to 1.5 percent of all energy consumption globally.1
Digital transformation also addresses the need to build what Gartner calls a “digital immune system.”2 A strong digital immune system addresses potential—and increasing—cybersecurity threats, site reliability engineering (SRE), and autoremediation, among other things.
The “Why” of Digital Transformation
In any modern organization, digital transformation is imperative. Evolving from traditional to modern environments requires that organizations adapt to meet dynamic market trends, emerging tools and techniques, and customer needs.
Customer satisfaction ultimately defines the success of business outcomes. Accordingly, successful companies value their users and their users’ experience with their brand. People have many choices today and, so, tend to choose companies that respect their wants and needs. Digital transformation ensures companies remain connected to—and well serve—their audiences.
In a new work-anywhere world, digital transformation also encompasses internal interactions, such as employee communication and collaboration. Regardless of business model or company size, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing efficient communications, workflows, and deliverables. Technology helps align team members for productivity and reduce their potential for human error. The bottom line is that any business relies on its people; by facilitating productivity, collaboration, and connection between workers anywhere in the world, organizations and their customers benefit.
To further confirm why digital transformation matters, recent statistics show that:
- 89 percent of enterprises are planning to adopt or have already adopted a digital business strategy3
- 70 percent of organizations have a digital transformation strategy or are working on one3
- The implementation of digital technologies can help accelerate progress toward enterprise goals such as financial returns, workforce diversity, and environmental targets by 22 percent3
Essentially, digital transformation ensures your organization remains relevant in a business environment where others are adopting such initiatives.
8 Digital Transformation Resolutions for 2023
1: Create a plan to deal with the datafication of everything.
Datafication, the process of transforming human tasks into data-driven software applications and devices, is changing daily life. In this time where personal data is currency, smartphones, smart homes, and smart offices are powered by AI that is fueled by data to produce even more data. Effectively and efficiently capturing, monitoring, using, and protecting data in today’s economy is a ubiquitous core demand for every organization.
2: Support hybrid workers in a more flexible and streamlined way.
Workers now have a flexible working style in terms of full- or part-time hours, geographic location, and environment. This hybrid work culture is a product of digital transformation at a global level because of the pandemic. Transformation efforts are now beyond no-code and low-code technologies to replace manual work with automation; today’s focus is about tackling peak productivity and ensuring workers are connected to their organizations and team members. That means employees need the right hardware, with the right apps, with data security to maintain their responsibilities to optimize the connection between technology and their performance.
Many CIOs have taken steps toward app modernization and public cloud migration. Using cloud solutions supports data-intensive workloads, like AI solutions for data analysis and edge computing, as well as universal app access for remote workers.
3: Explore how AI, machine learning, advanced analytics, and telemetry can make your business smarter.
AI is making our world smarter, smoother, and hassle free. Having the capability to run AI is a key part of today’s systems architecture. AI can automate routine tasks, leaving higher-thinking decisions to employees. Elevating analytics to advanced forms of data insight supports data-driven business decisions. This informs customer experience, workflow process, and product development and marketing. Using predictive modeling, AI can contribute to business intelligence (BI) that makes it easier to explore new and informed approaches and strategies. Competitive advantage goes to organizations that can access and understand large data sets, such as information from the intelligent edge and unstructured forms of data.
Telemetry is a term for technologies that collect information as measurements or statistics, which is then shared with remote IT systems for troubleshooting problems and informing data center operations. Incorporating telemetry data, AI, machine learning, and big data analytics capabilities gives organizations insights that can support intelligent decisions.
4: Improve compute power and efficiency using sustainability practices.
Nearly every device and appliance are now computerized, with the associated infrastructure continuously evolving. In terms of networks, the seemingly new 5G is quickly spawning an even newer era of 6G, with more power in our hands through devices. Additionally, with increasingly complex and data-intensive workloads, it becomes important to be as efficient as possible for performance, budget, and the environment—in terms of sustainability. Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, including accelerator technologies, can help make the most of the architecture you have now to meet these goals today and as you expand in the future.
5: Explore extended reality.
Extended reality (XR) comprises technologies that simulate reality, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). This significant technology trend shows that customers are looking for a break from real-world boundaries. The technology to create a reality without tangible presence is highly desirable for media developers, product designers, medical specialists, retail experts, and modeling professionals. It’s not just for gamers anymore.
6: Get a robust assessment and testing plan for zero trust cybersecurity.
People today are familiar with—and trust—digital technologies, believing that technology can reliably create a safe, secure digital world. This digital trust is leading to more innovation as companies feel confident in inventing and innovating without jeopardizing public sentiment.
At the same time, more technologies increase potential attack surfaces and risk exposure. An emerging strategy for organizations focusing on cybersecurity is zero trust, which means taking a proactive and pervasive approach to system security. Essentially, default operations are set to trust no one, whether inside or outside the network; verification is required for all access to network resources. Working toward a zero trust environment means regularly assessing, testing, and upgrading your cybersecurity up and down the stack.
7: Optimize your cloud infrastructure.
Cloud computing is a former trend gone mainstream, with more businesses migrating to cloud solutions. The emerging trend within cloud computing is edge computing. Edge computing processes data closer to where it is generated—at “the edge”— to reduce latency and increase access to data for insights. This also makes access to applications and software more efficient for remote staff. Ensuring your cloud instances are provisioned correctly supports bottom-line budgeting and optimized performance.
8: Improve performance for networks and edge computing resources.
As the quantity of data organizations capture increases, some circumstances have surfaced for latency in cloud computing, specifically in getting information from applications in the cloud and in getting data to a data center for processing. As a result, edge computing has emerged to process data closer to where it’s generated—at the edge. One use for edge computing is to process time-sensitive data to a centralized location from remote locations that have limited, inconsistent, or even no connectivity.
The pace of business has accelerated dramatically, and it demands more from your organization’s IT infrastructure. Maintaining legacy data centers unfit for the task can monopolize your IT team’s bandwidth, leaving them unable to support strategic goals. This is why 85 percent of organizations are pursuing a data center modernization strategy. Connection’s Data Center Transformation specialists have spent decades focused on understanding the data center needs of organizations.
1. George Kamiya, “Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks,” IEA, September 2022, https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks.
2. Lori Perri, “What Is a Digital Immune System and Why Does It Matter?,” Gartner, October 25, 2022, https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-is-a-digital-immune-system-and-why-does-it-matter.
3. “72 Vital Digital Transformation Statistics: 2022 Spending, Adoption, Analysis & Data,” Finances Online, November 7, 2022, https://financesonline.com/digital-transformation-statistics/.
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