Sunday, August 19, 2018

Digital Transformation - Trends, Roles

Fearful of being outflanked by more nimble competitors, companies are innovating at a faster pace than ever. To avoid disruption, companies are experimenting with new digital services and capabilities to augment existing offerings or to slide into adjacent markets.
Consider the soaring interest in virtual assistants, particularly chatbots. Pulling across business and technology domains, chatbots leverage natural language processing to establish a new digital pathway directly between the customer and the business. Behind the scenes, powerful analytics serve up recommendations via the chatbot. Banks, industrial manufacturers, retailers and just about every other type of business are implementing these digital tools. 
There is a veritable digital ocean of complimentary possibilities, including applications of IoT, blockchain and quantum computing. The falling costs of compute, storage and bandwidth have also facilitated the rise of social, analytics, and artificial intelligence technologies. These tools, paired with design thinking, agile development and DevOps, are at the center of many digital transformations. IDC estimates spending on digital transformation will exceed $2 trillion in 2019, with 40 percent of all technology spending will be for digital transformation technologies.

Essential digital transformation roles

Savvy CIOs acknowledge that even with the latest and greatest technologies and agile processes that digital transformations fall down without the right staff to conduct them. Hiring enough software engineers, cloud computing specialists and product managers remain tall tasks.
But at a time when transformations lean increasingly on digital tools influenced by machine learning and artificial intelligence, IT departments supporting business-wide transformations require UX designers, digital trainers, writers, conversational brand strategists, forensic analysts, ethics compliance managers and digital and workplace technology managers.

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