Swimming is fun, but it is a known fact that when you wade across a stream, you need to flow with the current or else you may drown. This fact applies to businesses as well!
A business needs to follow the market trends and change itself to thrive in the industry to continue making profits. A business that doesn’t transform itself with time, is unable to stand the test of time. There are a number of companies that were famous in the 80s or 90s but no one remembers them anymore because they failed to transform themselves as per the changing times and thus were either acquired or merged by the big players and are now non-existent like Remington typewriters, Compaq, General Motors, Merry-Go-Round, Kodak, Eastern Airlines, Pan Am and more.
What it means to be a business today?
It was and is always about making a ‘profit’.
The traditional business models were hierarchical and structured, but today disruptive technology has disrupted everything. It has brought many changes in the business scenario – it is more about customer centric selling now, rather than product centric selling of the past. Moreover, customer personas have changed and with it, has come changed demands and expectations. Last but not the least, competitive landscape with low economic barriers to entry has made doing business walking a tightrope today.
Today’s business environment is all about agility and digital technologies – the two crucial factors without which a business will not be able to cope in the future.
“We as business leaders don’t work in isolation. We live in a multi-constituent world. Our long-term ability to grow is directly related to our ability to make our climate more sustainable, our economies more viable, and that only happens if we ask ourselves what difference is our business making, what difference are we making?”- said Satya Nadella.
Business agility helps companies adapt and respond faster to the changing business environments, extend their reach to the available market opportunities and fasten revenue growth, whereas digital technologies open routes to new ways of doing business. Together, they help a business improve internal processes and better engage and serve their customers.
Cloud – the enabler of digital technologies and business agility
The Bain & Company study reported that more than 90% of current customer demand for cloud comes from replacing or upgrading existing, non-mission critical applications and from the creation of new digital businesses.
Cloud is the enabler of digital transformation and walk hand in hand with business agility. It helps companies to balance their business equation by enabling them to deliver competitive advantage, optimize costs and improve user performances.
But this study also reported that most of the companies are not fully utilizing the cloud to change their work processes- including connecting, streamlining and optimizing business processes for creating new value propositions.
So, if your business is the one lagging behind, cloud solutions can certainly help digitally transform it to help it lead in the digital world of tomorrow.
How to make your business successful?
- Stop hanging on to traditional systems and mindset, transform and innovate
Owning a vintage car, is no doubt something to be proud of, but owning old systems is surely not a way to profitability and efficiency. The business priorities are quite different today, which makes it mandatory for organizations to take the digital route and adopt cloud solutions that can help them innovate and deliver new products or services, improve and automate processes, identify threats and create more streamlined business processes to aggressively compete for the market share or face being elbowed out of the market.
For this, it’s important that the mindset is ready to adapt and training employees and arming them with new skillset is an as essential part of the transformation, as is using new tools and technologies.
2. Rethink and retool the ways your company collaborates
Digital progress cannot take place in silos.
Today’s organizations need to break down the traditional concept of separate departments, separate goals and need to start utilizing business productivity tools that enable improved communication and collaboration. They help in achieving more in less time by enabling working from anywhere, anytime with access to important tools and files.
Microsoft Office 365 is one such tool that helps create an operational culture that supports innovation and empowers your workforce to be more productive by being more connected, thus helping you cut down business inefficiencies.
With team collaboration tools in the cloud like Skype for business, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, you can work on projects together, communicate back and forth, assign different tasks and check on your team’s progress.
Cloud also enables you to hire best employees in the form of remote workforce for your business, for more streamlined operations with cost optimization.
3. Have increased business focus – free yourself from mundane tasks
In a digital age, only the fittest will survive. But, who’s the fittest? The one who has the ability to remain competitive. For that, a business should first look at the landscape it is competing in, and be more focused on its core business operations. For that, it’s crucial that it migrates its business workloads and applications to the cloud.
This will help an organization stick to its core business and free the resources from repetitive tasks related to the management of IT infrastructure like backup, patches, network maintenance, software upgrades etc.
This helps an organization increase its profit as well with time.
4. Build hyper scalable business model
Businesses which are highly scalable, grow exponentially. Scalability helps a business grow without any needless expenditure. So, make your business more scalable with cloud services.
They help you scale resources up or down as per the fluctuations in your business size and needs. Cloud being a subscription based model allows a business to pay for those resources, which they consume and save for non-procured ones.
This level of agility gives an edge to the business using cloud services over the ones still using traditional setup.
5. Make your business disaster proof
To be profitable, a business should always be available to its customers but disasters are unpredictable, as they come uninformed in different forms and hamper the availability of your business.
Loss of data is the biggest loss for any business and this data loss can wreck your business, so you need to make your business smart and failproof. With Cloud hosting, a business gets safe storage and data protection options. With managed Azure cloud , you get the ability to predict threats and vulnerabilities and assurance of stability of your backup, required for data protection.
To accelerate your digital transformation, find your change agents by visiting: https://www.znetlive.com/digitaltransformation-newmanaged/
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Awesome tips…!Thanks for sharing your brain with us…
Thanks for sharing useful business tips Lipika
Your aim is always to make your business at the top level, you wish to earn profit but unfortunately, you lack something and you become unable to achieve your goal but have you ever think for a second what are the things that you are lacking in the avenue of success. Therefore, keep few things in your mind and thrive your business.