The 2020s will be the decade when businesses really get to grips with digital transformation, with the goal of becoming more agile and innovative. And from what we've seen so far, this won’t be optional: no organisation or industry sector has been immune to the disruptive effects of digital and mobile technologies. This last year alone has already seen unprecedented change and disruption, with remote working going from an occasional perk to a critical necessity overnight.
While there’s no single blueprint for how to manage your digital transformation programme, we believe success depends on achieving excellence in one or two areas initially, such as mobile working, customer experience or internal collaboration. You can then build out, adding complementary digital capabilities and exploiting the synergies between these different areas.
Here we look at the four key ingredients you can use to achieve these goals.
Digital Workplace
- Digital Workplaces, often the first step in an organisation’s digital transformation journey, take you beyond simple automation and change the way you work and think, through smart, connected, collaborative, cloud-based tools. With more and more of us working from home or remote locations, you need to have tools that let your people work together more easily and more quickly, and that allow the business to develop a culture of collaboration and innovation.
Most companies find the technical transition to these new environments to be relatively straightforward. There are plenty of migration tools designed for a wide range of legacy systems, while companies like Ancoris have vast experience of migrating users, data and line-of-business apps to the cloud. The real challenge is changing the mindset of the business as a whole, so that it can exploit the benefits and opportunities of developing a collaborative culture.
That’s why the technical piece is only one element of our approach to helping customers to transition to a digital workplace with Google Workspace. Alongside the technical deployment, we'll run a change management programme designed to move your users from their current environment and ways of working to being productive and effective in a new environment, as quickly and seamlessly as possible. This starts as soon as we begin working with you and is critical to the success of any Google Workspace implementation. It ensures you have the necessary high-level sponsorship and a detailed understanding of your users and their needs, as well as communication, marketing, training and go-live support plans for each user group.
The story doesn't end once your digital workplace has been rolled out, though. We'll hand you over to our customer success team. They're not just there to provide break-fix support and regular checks to ensure your system is optimised and healthy. They also offer a range of services to help you get the most out of your investment in Google Workspace and use it as a platform for business improvement and digital transformation.
You can see the success of our approach at customers like the London Borough of Hackney, eir and Lush.
Business Transformation
- Business Transformation that uses new mobile and cloud-native apps to eliminate the friction inherent in old ways of working which rely on legacy and paper-based processes. This paperless environment will improve efficiency, productivity, quality, customer experience and employee satisfaction.
Our customers, for example, have transformed their operations by using collaborative cloud solutions to:
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- digitise paper-based processes
- speed up reporting
- more effectively manage field workers
That highlights another big change that cloud computing will make to the way you work: providing you with the resources your people need to work at any time, from any location, using any device. Get it right and this flexibility results in a happier, more productive workforce that can provide a better experience for your customers, whether it’s on the shopfloor, in the field or in the back-office.
In fact, the key to using the cloud to deliver business transformation is to listen to your users, which is why we make it part of every step in every project with our customers. It all starts with a transformation workshop where we make sure we really understand your goals. That lets us present suggestions to you that will deliver against those goals to you — and we can even show you quick prototypes of what’s possible.
Our agile development approach is then driven by our belief that great UX design, along with thorough user testing and improvements driven by user feedback, is the key to rapid user adoption. Naturally, we use an agile methodology to deliver apps quickly and get them adopted successfully. We can also manage apps for you, handling the daily operations of your purpose-built solutions and platforms to allow your in-house IT to focus on delivering further elements of your business strategy.
You can see the success of our approach at customers like Rentokil and SYNLAB Laboratory Services.
Business Intelligence
- Business Intelligence that uses cloud-based data warehouse and data analytics to break down silos of information and give users self-service tools that let them explore — and exploit — data with confidence.
Research from MIT's Centre for Digital Business suggest data-driven businesses are more successful than businesses that don't use data to inform their decisions. However, smaller companies believe these advantages are out of reach because of the the expensive infrastructure and rarefied skills associated with traditional data warehouse projects. With the cloud, all that has changed.
By applying highly scalable, but affordable, cloud computing power to the massive amounts of data they’re already collecting, our customers are gaining new insights in real time and making data-driven decisions much more quickly. This is helping them to
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- predict market trends and create better forecasts
- optimise their operations and supply chains
- understand how customers are actually using their products
- deliver more personalised content to customers
Our approach takes advantage of all the benefits of cloud data analytics solutions. Working with customers, we can create proof-of-concept applications with their own data that can be deployed in weeks not months. That lets them engage key decision-makers, deliver quick wins, and demonstrate the long-term ROI. Yet our customers know they’re building these first projects on robust, secure infrastructures that will grow with them.
We also help customers deploy cloud-based tools that empower business users to explore their own data and surface insights without having to involve data specialists or the IT department. And we help them understand and exploit solutions that put advanced data science technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence within reach of every organisation through tools that are easy to implement and use.
You can see the success of our approach at customers like Causeway Technologies, Play Sports Network and The Works.
Cloud Platform
- Future-proofed Cloud Platforms that let you easily and quickly innovate, collaborate and become more data driven. With the right cloud platform, you’re able to:
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- rapidly migrate existing workloads
- quickly develop and deploy secure, scalable new apps
- easily and affordably take advantage of cutting edge technologies like advanced analytics and containerisation
And because cloud computing changes how IT is delivered, it also changes what you can expect from your in-house IT team. Freed from operational tasks such as provisioning servers, patch management and capacity planning, your people can focus on new projects that exploit cloud technology to add business value, taking your business further along its digital transformation journey.
Ancoris is your partner-in-cloud throughout, from initial assessment and analysis of your current environment through creating the roadmap for your infrastructure modernisation to helping you migrate —- and then using your new platform to drive your business forward. Our expertise and experience across numerous cloud projects lets us help you select the best solutions for your business, plan migrations and execute them smoothly, and quickly develop and deploy new applications, all while optimising your costs.
You can see the success of our approach to using cloud-first architectures to unlock a whole new world of digital freedom and opportunity at customers like Lush, MJ Quinn and Bizzby.
To find out more about how our customers have used these ingredients to accelerate their digital transformation — and how you can do the same — download our digital transformation whitepaper.
Working with our digital transformation specialists
If you're involved in the busy day to day and your teams have been working with a process a certain way for years, it can be hard to step back to imagine doing it in a totally different way.
Got an idea to transform your business and want help bringing it to life? We’re all ears. We design, build and manage customised mobile and cloud apps to meet your specific needs – either alongside your team or for you. Our early prowess in mastering APIs led to Google itself becoming a customer and us building their Exam Platform. So not only do we know our onions but you can trust us to deliver innovation and edge in spades.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you with your own digital transformation journey, why not take a look at some of our customer success stories or talk to our Digital Transformation Specialists.