BY MARSHAD BARRY
John Lennon in his famous song “Imagine”, sung “You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one”. The world needs dreamers who can passionately bring change to the world. Kahlil Gibran mentioned in the “The Prophet” that “The lust for comfort murders the passion of the Soul”.
Digital Transformation of business was a dream which has come true in today’s world in comparison to the world, centuries ago thankfully owing to the dreamers who made it a reality. One of the most prominent examples of this model is Jeff Bezos who developed an idea of selling books digitally as opposed to maintaining physical book stores and its branches. Amazon’s out of the box thinking transformed the traditional business, bringing instant results. (Digital.hbs.edu,2017)
Not unbeknownst to all, the coronavirus has created a massive impact in economies and lives around the world subsequently causing countless businesses to suffer major losses. In this context businesses have to consider new dimensions whilst changing and altering their strategies, policies, and offerings to stay in business, especially in today’s context where digital transformation has become a major tool for their survival. This aids the reduction of operating costs by reducing the execution of processes beginning with converting your website visitors into customers. Enlightening oneself in this particular area of Digital transformation will make you realize that it has brought a metaphorical wave of change for the business landscape and demand, where without it there is no survival. Thus, enhancement in use of digital technologies to connect people, systems and organizations which creates the process of converting materials such as analogue data to digital-to-digital data refers to Digitization. (Ritter and Pederson, 2019)
Withholding up to 15 years’ experience in the Banking industry, I have comprehended that digitalization has created many opportunities for customers to experience and aid the industry to gain revenue through it. Few examples are the introduction of paperless transactions; today, customers can open an account electronically along with signatures which are transformed in to electronic signatures causing customers the advantage of not being present to attend a bank physically. Mobile Banking and Internet Banking saves time, making life easy and in present conditions provides safety to all customers. Almost every licensed commercial bank providing the service to pay utility bills under the digital banking platform is another milestone. This has made immense comfort to the customer and revenues to the bank proving the definition of “Digital Transformation”. At the same time, transforming the business process by leveraging digital technologies in order to create revenue and to improve business processes are what Digitalization refers to (Innolytics – Innovation, 2021)
Digital Transformation of a business is like an iceberg; even though it looks easy to transform a business into a digital platform like that of the tip of the iceberg visible to the naked eye, the other seven – eighths of it is underwater. Nevertheless, realizing the importance of the digital presence and focusing business enhancement by investing money and time to compete with the competitors in the market will remain challenging yet fruitful in the long run.
