The extreme competitiveness of a truly connected enterprise

Disruption is driving a tectonic shift in business models. Businesses are entering the “third era of IT,” according to Gartner; where they’re no longer just considering digital transformation but are implementing it and scaling it.

Today we mark the passing of an inflection point. Yesterday, you focused on products and services to offer quality, consistency, and reliability to increase customer-perceived value. Now, value is driven by customer experience – your customers’ experience with your products and services. This is not an afterthought, it is a matter of survival. Every aspect of your products and service offerings must become smarter.

What if you could increase your flexibility and agility? It would mean being able to consistently meet your customers’ demands in this ever evolving, truly connected world. This is not as easy as it may sound.

Successfully transforming to deliver a superior, connected customer experience requires nothing less than a corporate metamorphosis.

This requires the investment into eight new capabilities:

• To become truly connected, you need to understand the maturity of your current capabilities as well as your limitations.
• You need hybrid and cloud-agnostic capabilities for both the transition period and the architectural target-state.
• Your technology infrastructure needs to be extended to many new touch-points with customers and across a heterogeneous range of systems, devices, sensors and machines. Device management is essential.
• Generating and collecting customer data becomes increasingly important, because your customers are demanding subscription-based offerings. An accurate view of your customers’ usage can be continuously maintained and refined.
• Your enterprise must understand how to manage this data in risk and compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR. This is a radical shift for “pure” manufacturers. Terms and conditions, warranties and SLAs – you will have to transform these to reflect the nature of the evolved offering.
• If you want to establish communications channels directly with your end customers, you must be prepared to efficiently manage an increased number of customer queries.
• With so much additional data, the lifeblood of your company turns into a trifecta of data management, analytics, and machine learning. Securely collecting and sharing the data between domains is essential, and you must fully use analytics and machine learning to detect both abnormalities and opportunities.
• You will have to monetize your data to create some previously unimagined products. Some could relate to your current business and provide additional revenue streams in the current market. Others could open new revenue streams in completely new markets.

Software AG’s Situation Report 2022

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Ultimately, turning your organization into a truly connected enterprise requires adopting an Everything-as-a-Service mindset. You must prepare to compete – to disrupt your competition and find new revenue streams while delighting new and old customers. Only then can a truly connected enterprise be best placed to deliver extreme competitiveness and leading-edge customer experience.

Transforming into a truly connected enterprise is a journey and we at Software AG are honored to help 10,000 customers, 50% of Fortune 100 and over 400 partners worldwide on their journey.