Given the lingering effects of COVID-19, 2022 was a big year for digital transformation across industries. To keep the wheels turning and maintain their competitive edge, many businesses had to embrace remote work, invest in eCommerce, and up their social media game.
We’ll continue to see more of this in 2023, as data analytics platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, low-code and no-code tools, and other game changing technologies continue to become more advanced and more accessible.
To kick off the new year, let’s take a look at some digital innovations that CIOs and other business leaders should consider adopting to increase productivity, lower costs, and drive revenue in 2023.
Composable architecture for greater business flexibility
Composable architecture is a cloud-based approach that involves breaking up large, complex business systems into smaller, more lightweight components, which can then be managed and scaled independently. This approach plays a key role for growing businesses that want to adopt new, best-in-class technologies, without having to overhaul their entire system and risk disrupting internal processes or live customer experiences.
The traditional business technology stack is more rigid and monolithic, which means that new implementations and software updates require significant coding work from the development team. As you may already know, this results in slow deployment times, or the unfeasible implementation of newer, more powerful solutions.
Under a composable architecture, on the other hand, key business services—whether it be a headless CMS, product information management (PIM) solution, or data analytics platform—are connected primarily through APIs, enabling teams to leverage best-in-class tools, without having to make real foundational changes to their tech stack. And as business needs change over time, those teams can quickly and easily swap out outdated tools for more optimal solutions. At the end of the day, this all amounts to greater business agility, resilience, and scalability.
Automation tools for higher productivity and lower costs
Removing mundane, time-consuming workflows not only makes your employees’ lives easier, it also helps reduce human error and operational costs, allowing you to put more resources toward high-priority objectives. Every year, automation tools get smarter, faster, and more reliable. Plus, they never take coffee breaks, go on vacation, or sleep.
Let’s look at the two biggest innovations in workflow automation that every CIO should be considering for their company: Robotic process automation (RPA) and no-code or low-code tools.
RPA tools allow users to create, deploy, and manage software bots that perform tasks within critical business applications. From logging into portals, to engaging in conversations with customers, to analyzing reports, to extracting, copying, inserting, and deleting data, these bots can be trained to complete all kinds of repetitive tasks that were traditionally handled by humans.
Similar to RPA, low-code and no-code automation platforms help businesses build automated workflows, without requiring significant coding work—or no coding work at all—from their in-house development team. Without the steep learning curve previously required for programming automation tools, businesses can now launch superior systems faster, with less money and people involved.
The main difference between RPA and low-code or no-code automation solutions is that RPA focuses specifically on understanding and mimicking human behavior through bots, while the latter generally focuses on deploying internal applications in lighting speed, without sacrificing performance.
Implementing these tools means greater productivity, higher accuracy, better compliance, and accelerated digital transformation, so that your business can grow at its own pace, without being held back by outdated tools and processes.
Centralized customer data platforms (CDPs) for stronger personalization
Achieving a 360 degree view of your buyers helps sales and marketing teams establish better customer segmentation, leading to smarter outreach strategies, content, promotions, and eventually higher sales. But today’s customers can learn about, browse, and purchase products from a range of sources, whether it be a marketing site, eCommerce store, social media platform, or mobile app—and they’re accessing these sources from various devices, such as smartphones, laptops, smart speakers, and so on.
The goal here is to collect data from each platform and device, so that you can better understand your customers’ wants and needs through analyzing their behavior. This is why so many companies are now leveraging CDPs, as they enable an intuitive and efficient system for centralizing, analyzing, and acting upon customer data from disparate sources. With this data, you can discover opportunities to make front-end experiences easier, friendlier, and more personalized to specific buyer types.
Anything-as-a-service (XaaS) for greater scalability across teams
XaaS describes a wide range of business solutions delivered to organizations via the cloud. This includes software as a service (SaaS), analytics as a service (AaaS), containers as a service (CaaS), and the list goes on. As a growing number of companies adopt fully remote and hybrid working environments, the need for cloud-based solutions becomes critical.
With the XaaS approach, any IT function can be transformed into a service and paid for in a flexible consumption model. That is, rather than purchasing a license for a certain technology, installing it, and providing routine maintenance, companies can simply pay for the service—with the cost depending on their level of consumption—and let the vendor handle all work related to installation, maintenance, and updates. By making the switch to an XaaS model, businesses are able to cut down on operational costs and deploy IT resources more efficiently.
Integrated cybersecurity systems for better data protection
The widespread adoption of remote work in a post COVID-19 world has forced enterprise companies to rethink their cybersecurity efforts. After all, with employees accessing private data from servers all across the globe, hackers can more easily find vulnerabilities and exploit them. Data is constantly traveling between cloud technologies, IoT devices, edge computing tools, and so on, which means enterprise cybersecurity systems need to be more flexible and resilient.
Thus, many organizations are adopting a “mesh approach,” which advocates for a more integrated system, made up of multiple cybersecurity solutions—rather than relying on a singular technology to protect all assets. Similar to the composable architecture approach discussed above, the mesh approach allows companies to leverage best-in-class solutions, based on their unique data protection requirements. And as requirements change, these solutions can be scaled, managed, and replaced, without having to overhaul the entire tech stack.
Wrapping up
The business world is changing faster than ever, so equip your organization with the foundation and tools it needs to succeed today, tomorrow, and twenty years from now. First, find a digital transformation partner with experience and expertise around the trends and technologies that are currently redefining your industry.
Here at Codal, we help modernize and grow enterprise organizations by implementing cutting-edge technologies, whether it be a third-party application or custom solution that we built from scratch. Our digital strategies and solutions solve real business problems and promote long-term growth in an ever-changing landscape.
So if your business is interested in updating its legacy systems by embracing the digital innovations discussed above, we would love to connect with you. And if you’d like to learn more about what Codal does, check out some of our recent projects.
Ready to take your business to the next level in 2023? Get in touch with a member of our team today!
