Business Ecosystem Metamorphosis: From Noticing the Elephant in the Room to Training it

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Picture of Jitesh Banga
Jitesh Banga
Elephant in the room

The new digitally-conscious customer has new demands. They are spoilt for choice, have higher, myriad, and mutable expectations, and vouch for personalized experience and transparency. To strive for fulfilling the ever-evolving demands of customers, businesses today must carve out an effective digital strategy that paves the way for digital transformation. Their objective should be to become digital in entirety.

Speaking of a digital strategy, enterprises must employ diverse methods or techniques to establish alignment with the variations in the digital sphere to undertake their respective digital transformation initiatives.

Companies need to make buoyant efforts to invest in modern digital technologies to better understand customers and their changing needs, to fold cohesive experiences across all channels in customers ecosystems, and to operate efficiently in order to deliver the changes in real time.

Noticing the Elephant in the Room

Though every business, no matter how small or big it is, is aiming towards becoming digital, it isn’t easy, to say the least.

As a matter of fact, with the rapid evolution of digital products and services, the task of navigating through the landscape of digital business swiftly has gone from being difficult to nearly impossible. Further, delayed innovation cycles are responsible for jeopardizing the survival of traditionally-oriented firms. Cultural and technological changes that follow every businesses’ digital transformational journey is an additional challenge in disguise.

However, noticing the elephant in the room is just a start. The real challenge is to teach their lumbering elephant to dance like a nimble ‘milonguero’.

Teaching the Elephant to do the Tango

Teaching an elephant to dance to your tunes seems like an unachievable dream. But, with the right tool and technique, it is within the realm of possibility.

Businesses that are in the path of becoming digital have to witness various inhibitors that can make their journey cumbersome. However, as they say, it takes two to tango, enterprises heading for the digital transformation journey must establish a digital business ecosystem which will help them interact with customers & partners outside the company and improve performance. Being a part of the digital ecosystem, organizations can exchange information and data to create value with customers, partners, adjacent industries, and competitors for commercial gain, innovation or common interest.

Digital ecosystems allow businesses to move faster, maximize productivity, and minimize on-premises investments and other liabilities. The benefits further multiply as every partner organization shares applications, information, and bandwidth through mutual use of the ecosystem.

How to Train the Elephant?

No doubt digital ecosystems are unfathomably complex business environments that are difficult to build and manage. To master digital business and its varying dimensions, industry pioneers must minimize the complexity of digital ecosystems and learn to generate value within such ecosystems. Once the complexity is handled, organizations that are part of the digital ecosystems drive faster innovation, efficient production, and agile go-to-market activities.

Considering the fact that all organizations striving to become digital are facing complexities, the question is how to battle it?

Clearly, technology is the answer.

Technology enables enterprises to drive innovation and growth by meeting their digital transformation objectives.

For companies undertaking digital initiatives, technology is the imperative need. In truth, it’s impossible to truly benefit from digital drift unless organizations can transform their businesses and the culture within them. As Steve Jobs once said,”You have to start with the customer and work back to the technology.”

So, no matter how varied your customer or clients demands are, the right technology fills the bill.

Modernized ecosystem integration technology serves as an aid to support the complexities of the ecosystem; it fulfills the need of an enterprise to prepare a business & IT strategy to meet application integration, B2B and EDI integration, big data integration, and cloud integration requirements in toto.

Ecosystem integration technology allows enterprises of all sizes to engage and empower by allowing business users to establish connections within a short span with the help of prebuilt templates. This helps organizations to fasten their onboarding process, therefore helping enlarge their market share and accelerate time-to-revenue.

Integration platforms also enable IT governance that helps enterprises align IT architecture and strategy with business objectives thereby increasing IT productivity and eliminating shadow IT. Further, a robust integration solution allows and manages data exchange in various sizes, formats etc.

Ecosystem integration makes enterprises more agile and helps them respond to changing market trends and customer needs accordingly. Hence, the rigidity perishes and consequently, businesses can insulate from the ebbs and flows of digital lattices as they reinvent their infrastructure.

The current business models can easily align with these integration platforms that have intuitive, easy-to-use, and readily available dashboards, thus motivating enterprises to offer a delightful customer experience.

Business with the goal of becoming digital and conforming to changing market standards & customer needs should adopt technology trailblazers such as ecosystem integration to guarantee their expansion in every sense.