Cybercrime has become a steadily increasing problem in recent years. As businesses become more reliant on technology, companies also become more vulnerable to cyberattacks. But how can you prevent cybercrime whilst also fulfilling your responsibilities as a business owner…?
When the term cybercrime comes to mind, what do you picture? In reality, this type of crime presents little threat to any business. When it comes to protecting your business from cybercrime, there are two important ways to think about the issue. First, that there are a variety of common and uncommon threats your company faces every day.
In today’s time, digital transformation has increasingly become a buzzword used to describe any new technology adopted by existing businesses. Despite this trend, in reality, digital transformation is a radical shift in how a company capitalizes on the opportunities that the tech industry provides.
A digital transformation fundamentally changes how businesses provide value to their customers and streamline their processes. It’s a reminder that materials and processes your company uses during day-to-day operations, no matter how big or small, might need a new medium technology.
Simply put, things are often easier when they’re online. New technology makes website building more accessible and creates more opportunities for businesses to connect with their audiences. Digital technologies like websites allow organizations to interact with customers in a far broader way than before. These opportunities don’t just exist for large companies who can afford to build out large websites, but also for smaller businesses.
If you learn how to integrate digital little by little, in a way that is supporting your business’s goals and aligns with your existing workflows, then I call that success.
The dawn of the Internet and the advent of newer, more effective modes of communication such as instant messaging, social media, and email marketing have enabled companies to build closer customer relationships. With this, businesses are witnessing a shift towards digital processes that also enable them to conduct overall large-scale business tasks. Businesses everywhere are replacing conventional methods with online processes for better convenience, privacy, security, and quick execution of the processes.
Get more information about what digital transformation is.
By understanding both the problems your business solves and the goals you hope to accomplish, you can create a plan that will be beneficial to your team. The right path Digital Roadmap is created for large businesses that want to step into the digital age and fully understand the challenges they face.
Your customer service team spends too much time logging all of your incoming calls and navigating a disorganized data storage system. With a lack of adequate knowledge, you are unable to make the underlying challenges more efficient and transparent for the customer. A digital transformation will help you identify these underlying challenges and allow you to provide your customers with a better experience.
Digital transformation is the need to change for your business growth, technology with a process that has to work together both back and forward. Competing in a marketplace on future innovation is aggressive, new, demanding, and very quick to adopt new technology. So it is important to guess your customer’s needs in advance.
There are several solid metrics you can use to gauge whether the digital transformation initiatives your business is turning to have been effective or not. These include things like lead generation, engagement with content on social media, referral traffic, and signup conversion rates.
The online landscape makes it fairly easy to keep tabs on your competitors. This will allow you to understand what they’re doing to take advantage of their strengths and outdo their weaknesses. Conducting this analysis helps you develop an actionable plan that takes into account everything from your company’s mission statement to the latest features.
Research your local competitors and find out where they rank in their categories, and what success, if any, they have had in digital transformation. Armed with this information, you can formulate a plan for your business to succeed in these areas.
Creating a budget is an important step of the digital transformation process. Look at how much you currently spend on your IT infrastructure. Write those numbers down.
The goal of digital transformation isn’t to completely replace the existing tools, processes, and talent with new ones. Instead, the goal is to use new technology to augment existing workflows and systems as well as introduce entirely new processes and assets. Digital transformation budgets should address all possible expenses you’ll encounter throughout the process: software costs for transitional and permanent tools, any costs to hire new talent, employee training for new processes, and allocation of funds for any unexpected costs.
“We are currently finalising the business case and awaiting certification from the state law advisor and DPME (Department of Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation) with regards to re-purposing SITA (State Information Technology Agency) to create a state IT Company, as well as merging Sentech and Broadband Infraco to form the state digital infrastructure company. We are further engaging our counterparts to ensure that non-broadband SOEs that self-provide broadband such as Sanral, Prasa, Eskom, and Transnet are prohibited from entering the commercial broadband market to avoid state distorting a well-functioning liberalised market,” says Minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams.
To be successful in a digital age, businesses must adapt. The proper tools for digital transformation will be different for every business, but the end goal is always the same: to become agile, have an online presence wherever customers are buying, and be ready for whatever comes next.
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Digital transformation entrepreneur Gaone Tlhong has launched a farm produce online marketplace, which she says is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic’s severe impact on farmers and consumers.
Tlhong, a globally-acclaimed vitiligo advocate, says although agriculture falls under essential services during the national COVID-19-induced lockdown, the traditional selling of fresh farm produce has been severely impacted by restrictions. Although there are sufficient food supplies available at national level, access to farmers’ and fresh produce markets has become extremely difficult for some during the lockdown. (more…)
The inability to recognize that digital businesses are radically different from traditional ones leads to both failure of vision and failure of execution in digital transformation programs. It is imperative that enterprises recognize that they need a new mindset and a new approach to succeed in the digitally disrupted world, or else they risk losing unrecoverable ground to the digital natives.
I want to share five principles to achieve transformative success in your digital journey.
 Image credit: Erik Mcleanvia Unsplash |
This proves that technological flexibility is fundamental in remaining relevant in a fast-changing world. While digesting the recent events and embracing a new reality and outlook on the future might seem challenging right now, adaptability is probably the most important trait any business can have at the moment.
Here are the four most important digital transformations we are likely to see in the coming months and years:
The coronavirus has pushed South African e-commerce forward many years in less than two months. According to a recent article on MyBroadband, South African food retailers have seen a 700% increase in web traffic volumes.
For many South Africans, online shopping has become the new norm during the pandemic. As behavioral patterns we repeat most often become etched into our neural pathways, new habits are formed. Even individuals who might not usually interact online on a daily basis, such as the elderly, have had no choice but to tech up to get their weekly supplies of essential goods.
Looking back to previous far-reaching Black Swan events, it’s safe to say they have been both havoc-wreaking and accelerating. The 2003 SARS epidemic, for instance, threatened Alibaba’s survival but was recognised later as the watershed moment for internet in China.