Digital technologies fundamentally transform organizations

Digital technology is dramatically reshaping industry after industry and many companies are pursuing large-scale change in effort to capture the benefits of these trends or simply to keep up with the competitors.

Digital transformations have wider in scope. Eight in ten respondents say their recent change efforts involved either multiple functions or business units or the whole enterprise and it generates a fierce debate among policy-makers, economists and industry leaders about its societal impact. There is a growing concern on how it is affecting issues such as jobs, wages, inequality, health, resource efficiency and security.

Organizations are making enormous strides and realizing the benefits of new digital business models and processes. We see examples of this everywhere—how people shop, work, learn, communicate, decide, respond and even elect leaders.

The enterprises are at a crucial turning point with the emergence of a post-digital world. The good news is that it offers tremendous value for both the vendors and partners, as the power of cloud and artificial intelligence will continue to advance, which began as a differentiating advantage years ago, and is now expected from every business.

A report says, digital revolution has created new roles (such as search engine optimization managers and social media account managers), new types of organizations (cloud computing providers and social media agencies), and even new sectors of the economy (digital security and data science). The impact of digitalization has also acted as a catalyst for employment growth in the wider economy. In India, for example, it is estimated that three to four jobs are created for every job within the business process outsourcing and IT-enabled services sectors

The adoption of cutting-edge technology, especially tools have become more robust and cheaper, will happen faster and on a larger scale as compared to what we have seen in the past. Data analytics will play an important role and therefore, needs to be adopted by both clients and auditors. The emphasis is to find outliers in the population rather than drawing conclusions from selected samples of transactions.

We have seen the organisations into manufacturing are employing machine learning tools to improve analysis of data and trends. Implementation of cognitive tools and natural language processing for e.g. could read contracts and other documents would further add to the quality of data gathered. Artificial Intelligence could be added for forecasting.

Secondly, as the adoption of technology is going at larger speed with an aim of achieving leaner and faster processes for planning/ budgeting/ forecasting, more automated controls and best-in-class standards, technology is going to play a key role in providing greater assurance levels, ultimately it would be the people involved in this partnership (between auditors and clients) that are of paramount importance. Technology will remain a tool, albeit a very important one, for the audit professional. Robots running the world will hopefully remain within the realm of sci-fi movies.

The result of fast-growing digitisation, could also be seen in the Indian economy, it has the potential to not only boost the core sectors like IT, digital communication, and online retail but also to transform several other areas of the economy that is Financial services, Agriculture, Logistics and Education.

The number is remarkable and has reached the mark of 610 million connected internet users, and citizens have downloaded 13.4 billion mobile applications in 2019, more than any other country except China. The average Indian social media user spends 17 hours on the platforms each week. India is the second fastest digitising economy after Indonesia as compared to 17 mature and emerging economies, including the US, UK, China, and Brazil.

With over $1.1 trillion invested by industry in digital transformation during 2018, there’s a feeling among industry leaders that many are well on their way to attaining what they have set out to achieve. For most, this involves moving to data-driven business models where decisions are made based on the huge volumes of up-to-date, fast-moving information generated by organizations in today’s digital world. However, organizations worry more about the volume and sophistication of cyber-attacks and are confused about what tools to use.  

In the post digital era, companies are moving towards a greater granularity in their understanding of customers. Based on people’s digital identities, businesses are able to develop ongoing personalized relationships in order to deliver rich, individualized products and services.

Lastly, the right customer experience is the unique mantra of success and enterprises have to understand consumers based on their unique digital identities can cater an ongoing, experience-based relationship with every individual customer.