2020 made the enterprise universe fundamentally reassess ways of working. The push towards digital transformation, something that had been growing over the years, accelerated as the pandemic forced everyone to work from home. Organizations had to realign their IT budgets, modernize infrastructure, and identify digital channels. They turned to digital means to drive customer experience, accelerate revenues, improve operational excellence, and enable collaboration and innovation while ensuring business continuity.
Digital transformation has now become crucial to sustaining growth. However, while digital transformation depends on technology that can improve the capacity to chase new revenue streams or business models, technology alone does not guarantee digital transformation. Organizations have to reshape how they strategize and learn to utilize technology in newer ways. This isn’t always about adopting cutting-edge technologies. It’s equally about how to leverage the omnipresent technologies of the day, like the mobile phone.
Let’s look at the starring role for the mobile in enterprise digital transformation and the opportunity this creates for telcos and communication service providers.
Mobility and its role in Digital Transformation
Enterprises looking to leverage digital technologies to transform their organization have to employ mobile to drive company-wide transformation.
Research suggests that 82% of executives agree mobile technologies are the face of digital transformation. This can’t come as a surprise given the growing smartphone proliferation and deep adoption in the enterprise space. Today, 80% of executives believe that workers cannot do their jobs without their smartphones. 70% of access to enterprise systems is via mobile devices.
Digital transformation conversations are thus incomplete without adequate focus on mobile. When people regularly use enterprise software from a mobile device it indicates that the system has become the lifeblood of the business. The enterprise mobile app allows employees to connect to core processes from anywhere, at any time, and be productive, free of locational constraints.
The objective of digital transformation is to infuse a wave of efficiency across the length and breadth of the organization. By incorporating mobility as an integral component of digital transformation, organizations can unleash significant latent potential by empowering a new level of employee performance. They can gain the capacity to redistribute access and intelligence all through the ecosystem, drive productivity and collaboration, and improve customer experience.
Mobility is central to the enterprise digital transformation narrative because it assists enterprises to develop the capability to:
- Improve customer experience and customer satisfaction, build rapport with overseas clients and connect with clients more efficiently across boundaries and time constraints
- Increase productive time by providing “always-on” access to systems and processes
- Improve the amount and quality of information captured because of multiple data touchpoints on the mobile application
- Drive employee enablement at work irrespective of where work happens
- Reach out and engage with customers on a channel of their choosing
- Improve data and process portability and enable smooth content sharing to enhance collaboration and communication experiences
- Increase time efficiencies and improve timely decision-making by providing access to vital data. This also increases cost efficiencies as storage and retrieval of data become synchronized along with complete access control of all the systems.
- Reduce costs by eliminating paper-based workflows, enabling remote work, and helping employees do more work in less time.
- Drive business process optimization and increase operational flexibility
Since the smartphone has cemented itself firmly into our lives, it’s no wonder that we are seeing similar trends in the enterprise. Given the power of mobility to enhance digital transformation initiatives, it makes abundant sense to adopt a mobile-first approach when embarking on the digital transformation journey.
The role of mobile operators and CSPs
The mobile is driving the ‘anytime, anywhere, and always available’ culture that these dynamic times demand. That’s why, we cannot discount the role of telcos, mobile operators, and CSPs in making this digitally-powered work environment a success.
Mobile operators and CSPs become important enablers of time and cost efficiencies especially as drivers of unified communication. Enabling retail quality routes, high clarity Voice using low-latency routes, and ensuring connections over IPX, multiple SIP protocol/codecs, or Managed IP become important enablers of connectivity to drive direct interconnections globally.
CSP’s and mobility carriers also must ensure that they have the right firewall solutions in place to protect themselves and block illegal traffic. They have to ensure that no A2P traffic reaches subscribers via the grey route to avoid monetary losses and unwelcome network congestions from spamming.
Enabling the right security protocols, system-level filtering, Intelligent SMS firewall rules, and guarantees of uptime with heartbeat redundancy become important consideration points to optimize the mobility experience.
In Conclusion
The role of mobile in the digital transformation narrative is only going to get stronger. Even companies like Microsoft have experienced ‘two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”. McKinsey further notes that while the pace of the pre-COVID world was fast, the luxury of time has completely disappeared now. All along digital transformation emerges as the antidote to the crisis and an imperative for the new normal. Given the proliferation of smartphones and the app economy, enabling digital transformation without a focus on mobile is almost like wanting to bake a cake without an oven. As is apparent, telecom companies, mobile operators, and CSPs have a crucial supporting role there too.