Digital Transformation Challenges for Business and Technology

The internal “kitchen” of both a large enterprise and a small company is something that the end-user does not know about. In fact, he doesn’t need it… as long as, for example, a business with more than a centenary goes bankrupt. Now the fault of this outcome is often the lack of automation.

At the BlockchainUa conference, Maxim Prokhorov, owner and managing partner of PM Partners, described how companies can keep up with the rapidly changing world.

Contemporary challenges for business

Technology in our lives has appeared relatively not long ago. And this has led to the fact that if earlier the company reached the mark of $1 billion within 20–25 years, now the time reduces to 5 years.

At the same time, companies that reach the top of $1 billion, often, don’t remain at this point for a long time, because the world is changing quite quickly and thus challenges all businesses, including Ukrainian ones.

On the other hand, companies are often guided by the principle of “why we need to change something if everything works for now “. Excel still is the most common program. There was the case of the Thomas’ Cook company, having been late to automate and revise its approaches, as a result, it went bankrupt, despite the fact that the company was more than 100 years old.

Actually, the sharing economy already exists.

Examples of this:

• Uber does not have a single car, but provides transportation services;
• Airbnb does not own any hotel, but provides living services;
• SpaceX will give away the Internet for free;
• Facebook does not have a single content platform, but sells content;
• Amazon literally did not produce anything, before the pandemic, but still is selling everything.

Where to start changing?

The first step is to gain experience. You need to understand what your customers, contractors, partners want, because that’s what you need to provide.

Where do you get this experience? From any available sources, be it a mobile app, portals, chatbots, etc.

Then the corporate culture should change significantly. Having visited many Ukrainian cities and working with big companies, I understood that unfortunately, is still quite far from the change of corporate culture. But certainly, it is vital for further existence.

Referred to above, ecosystems, significant improvement of management, and move from a planned economy to a real-market are needed to be made.

What are the challenges business faces in transforming itself?

Time will accelerate and it is needed to be ready for that. Technology is what can lead to changes.

We need to introduce new technologies. It’s faster to give customers a demo product to improve and get feedback. Only then the user will understand, accept your product/service, and become loyal to the brand.

Automation Corridor: Business — Time — Money

If automation does not solve the company’s problems, including those related to personnel, quality, then the company will die.

According to the rules, it should be this way: the company estimates whether automation mitigates negative human factors, improves quality and positively affects the ultimate profitability.

If you don’t have the answer to these questions, you don’t need automation yet (and if you don’t change your approach to business, you may never need it, because it simply will disappear).

In other words, automation can be effective when the corridor of business is shrinking to “business -time — moneу”. Тime is now the most important resource that helps companies earn and increase capitalization.

Recommendations and trends

Ecosystem. Even if you are a small company, you need to make a starting service history that should help not to lose the customer from your horizon. There is always a threat from big companies, so you need to make partners and provide the customer with more than the product or standard service.

Consumer experience. It is regularly changing and this year is an example of this. You have to collect it, track it and, most importantly, digitize it to understand how to live in the future.

Don’t write your software. It’s too long and risky. First, look for something ready.

Connect services. There are already quite a lot of services in the world that solve your problems, even if you think they aren’t. They can be found, if not on the local, then on the foreign market.

Automate the future. The current problem of even large companies, is that they automate the past. Respectively, this leads to almost no result. So, automatization of the future will help you compete with big companies.