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Leveraging Opportunities To Craft Advanced Ux & Cx Initiatives
An emerging ecosystem of microservices, containers, cloud scalability, devops, application monitoring, and streaming analytics is not a fad. It’s the future, already powering Silicon Valley and the world’s most advanced tech companies. Throw in machine learning and IoT and you have a comprehensive framework for the next phase of Enterprise IT, with continuous improvement as its founding principle.
According to a recent survey*, only 20.7 percent of manufacturing organizations surveyed rated themselves as “highly prepared” to address the emerging business models the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings. However, industrial leaders worldwide are increasingly digitizing essential functions within their vertical and horizontal operation processes, with a clear focus on the end-to-end digitization of all physical assets and integration into digital ecosystems.
Since the dawn of the digital era, businesses have been doing more with each passing year: Becoming digital themselves; growing more involved in people’s lives; embracing the “People First” view of the changing enterprise landscape while betting big on advances in data-hungry technologies. Global AI in IoT market was USD 4 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach around USD 19.9 billion by 2025, at a CAGR approximately 25.89% for the forecast period between 2019 and 2025*.
In such a scenario IT’s traditional delivery models can no longer keep up with the rapid-fire pace of technology innovation and the disruptive change it fuels. It’s an overarching priority for a company to quickly evolve into a forward-thinking enterprise where IT itself can transform to dramatically improve how organizations harness technology and deliver value. While ensuring that security fulfills its prerogative to be interwoven into infrastructure and operations seamlessly.
Challenges Into The Next Phase Of IT Infrastructure Design
1. Customer experience will become Customer Intelligence
Digital integration with the customer and new technological opportunities would move production closer to the customer, for example, with an increase in the number of digital natives, e-commerce or marketing digitally will demand greater individualization and customization of products and services. More organizations would require to use data analytics to meet customer requirements and improve operational performance. 72% of executives report that their organizations seek to gain customer trust and confidence by being transparent in their AI-based decisions and actions*. Customizing products all the way down to building a customer-focused supply chain would be imperative to changing the relationship with customers in response to changing needs and behavior.
2. Data Security and robust system will drive enterprise growth
Digital ecosystems and broad use of data raise important issues around cybersecurity. More touchpoints where data is collected and exchanged also means more potential points of entry for an attacker. requiring an end-to-end management of risks, threats and security issues. Unverified data is a new type of vulnerability— one that every business leveraging digital technologies must address. Left unchecked, with autonomous, data-driven decision-making increasing across industries, the potential harm from bad data could become an enterprise-level existential threat.
*Source: Bloomberg analysis of United Nation Data, 2018
3. Digitization would disrupt legacy systems
The widening gulf between this new world and most existing enterprise IT operations calls for a leap of change from legacy to modernity requiring profound, multiphase, across-the-board change. Lack of digital culture and training is the biggest challenge facing companies, along with cross transformation along organization, people, processes and technology. To fully power the connected intelligent enterprise, companies must first re-architect themselves.
These technology trends offer CIOs and their teams a roadmap for fundamentally overhauling IT from the bottom up and the top down. The wealth of data mined from the increasing number of sensors and connected nodes, advanced computing power, and improvements in connectivity, along with rapid advances in machine intelligence and neural networks, are motivating companies to truly transform.
Yet an explosion of new technological capabilities will stand tall to address challenges only with an integrated approach that also takes business problems in a comprehensive view. Design thinking as an approach is an imperative solution which enterprises could leverage to reinvent themselves while being in accordance with existing systems.
How could design solutions drive digital transformation?
1. Creating customer-centric solutions
Most digital systems were designed for the systems and not the users of those systems. With design-based approaches and research facilitating customer journey mapping, persona creations, design re-establishes the center of gravity to shift towards the needs of customers.
2. Gateway to simple and intuitive interfaces
As the attention span of users continues to decrease, design focuses to make the experience upfront sans deep hierarchies or repetitive steps. Validated with the users, interaction design enables to transform the experience to one which is engaging and easily comprehended.
3. Boosting collaboration
As enterprise applications necessitate a lot of collaboration and interdependencies to complete tasks, handoffs, navigation frameworks need to be well visualized and designed for expedited implementations.
4. Supplementing intelligent solutions
User Experiences in Enterprise applications are defined by how intuitive the applications are; the advent of AI, VR, AR, Predictive analytics and forecasting in enterprises could be leveraged by designing them to capture maximum user data and insights.
5. Building digital trust
As cybersecurity turns as a top priority for enterprises, designing products and services with visual cues that assuage users and build a perception of trust and confidence would go a long way to ensure engagement.
As design practitioners increase focus on enhanced Enterprise IT experiences and the convergence of new-age technologies, experience led practices and affordability of IT systems increase, the dawn of a symphonic enterprise is just around the corner. At Think Design, we manifest evidence of this every day of our work.
Looking Ahead: Futuristic Trends reshaping the world of enterprises
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Enterprise learning and employee engagement
Collaborative solutions
Collaboration will evolve to become one of the core pillars of the digital enterprise with a plethora of collaboration solutions out there, from messaging and content sharing to workflow automation, silo busting and team workspaces. Enterprises are going to settle on a portfolio of tools or an ecosystem platform that anchors digital teamwork in a collaborative canvas.
BYOD
This policy of bringing your own device is a growing trend. But to ensure its successful implementation, it’s important that all employee devices are equipped with enterprise-grade security features also to manage a wide range of devices across the organization. A mobile management solution might help.
Cross-platform applications
Applications running on multiple devices than on a single platform would help in the adoption of practices like the BYOD. According to a global survey, 71 percent of business enterprises believe mobility is a top priority, and 63 percent think mobility is the most significant factor in gaining competitive advantage. The market for BYOD and Enterprise Mobility is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 10.4%, between 2018 and 2026, to reach USD 74.9 billion, by 2026, , reflecting its growing importance in enterprises*.
Think Design’s Recommendation
Work is no longer a place but, rather, a thing you do. Companies are recognizing that they must provide the right tools to their employees to make them more productive. From a people standpoint, they are also transforming the culture and how teams work to foster creative thinking and drive faster product deployment. The trend offers companies the opportunity to reimagine an entirely new organizational model in which humans and machines become co-workers, complementing and enhancing the other’s efforts in a unified digital workforce, through integrative solutions.
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Digital solutions changing the enterprise ecosystem
Growth of enterprise tailored apps
The use of mobile apps to improve operational efficiency and customer experience has accelerated; companies are increasingly moving from generic apps to enterprise fit apps with specific functions. This avoids functional redundancy and ensures user-specific features resulting in a more streamlined workflow process.
Hybrid Cloud
Most enterprises — 85 percent — already operate in multicloud environments. By 2021, 98 percent of companies plan to use multiple hybrid clouds*.. Critical client solutions are now hosted on-premise while other enterprise solutions hosted on cloud) giving businesses greater flexibility and more data deployment options A recent report from Microsoft shows that 92 percent of customers who deployed a hybrid solution stated that they would follow the same strategy again.
API Revolution
In the IT world, application programming interfaces (APIs) are one of the key building blocks supporting interoperability and design modularity. APIs, as an architectural technique, can help improve the way systems and solutions exchange information, invoke business logic, and execute transactions. As for the first six months of 2019, the API directory has seen 1,320 new APIs added. That is an average of 220 new APIs being added every month or an increase of over 30% over the previous four years.
*Source: Api research, Programmable web directory
Think Design’s Recommendation
Digital transformation strategies will shift rapidly. Overcoming years, conversations around digital transformation will move away from identifying new opportunities for innovation and towards eliminating the bottlenecks of internal processes to take full advantage of digital transformation. Also as more businesses move to digital, with an advent in e-commerce sector there is a growing need to simulate offline user experiences of a purchaser to an engaging and simple online retail experience. Capabilities of having a flexible framework, responsive design and a strong emphasis on the user would ensure customer retention and growth of business in today’s world.
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Intelligent solutions driving transformation
Artificial Intelligence and Big data
While AI is predicted to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, 20% organizations planned to deploy AI enterprise wide in 2019. The ability of AI and big data to analyze large amounts of data to predict certain behaviors will play an increasing role in security, refining customer experiences and predictive analysis. Deep learning, with Google’s TensorFlow, IBM’s Watson, Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Cognizant Toolkit) and AWS (the MXNet framework plus the new Rekognition, Polly, and Lex services) are already leading the way.
*Source: 2019 AI Predictions, Report PwC
Multi-layered security model
The proliferation of mobile devices and apps in the workplace has only increased the importance of such a model. It helps to meet the critical goal of protecting enterprise data without impacting user productivity of the native device experience. Many different blockchain solutions have also emerged for using digital contracts, currency and authenticating identities, as a popular alternative to secure and seamless transactions.
Intelligent Distributed systems
Robotics, immersive reality, artificial intelligence and connected devices are bringing a new level of technological sophistication to the physical world. Businesses must redesign their infrastructures to support real-time action in dynamic environments, extend compute beyond the cloud, toward the edge of networks, rethinking current approaches to hardware and workforce capabilities. 63% of executives believe it will be critical over the next 2 years to leverage custom hardware and hardware accelerators to meet the computing demands of intelligent environments*.
*Source: IT infrastructure and edge computing, Technology Vision 2018, Accenture
Think Design’s Recommendation
Every successful enterprise would be a predictive enterprise in the future. Your ability to predict your customer’s needs, understand the market, predict trends will make all the difference in your success. Also, with attack surfaces growing exponentially due to embedded intelligence and the increased number of sensors there would be a need to bolster your own security-operation services with augmented threat intelligence. Integrating smarter design visual cues, intuitive visualizations, user-led research and garnering from those insights would pave the way for this highly intelligent future.
Think Design’s approach and recommendations to achieve superior enterprise user experiences
1. Always, design for the user
It might sound like a no brainer, but it is one of the most important approaches for superior enterprise UX. Most of the enterprise applications of the past fall flat at this single aspect: They were designed for the systems and not the users of those systems. Let us begin right this time!
2. Personas, Actors, Segments: Clarify user types
User-Centered Design in Enterprise UX assumes a different scale altogether since these applications usually have multiple user types. There are rules, rights, modules, workflows and handoffs… and all these are tied to the user groups. Understanding and defining them well is a good starting point.
3. Handoffs are critical: Design them well
All said and done, Enterprise applications are a lot about collaboration among user types. In this context, there are dependencies of one user with the other; and no single user is successful all by himself. This means that handoffs need to be well visualized, designed for and implemented very well. Quality of UX is heavily dependent on this factor.
4. Validate with users early on
While it is easier to validate with users in enterprise, it is usually ignored by stakeholders who seem to know what the users need. The peril of this empirical knowledge is that, we don’t validate our assumptions and tend to build solutions based on those. Quick n dirty or High fidelity, it is important to validate assumptions through design propositions; and we strongly advocate that.
5. The future is now; and it is intelligent
We may want to consider futuristic technologies in the future, but we believe that the future is now. AI, Voice Recognition and AR… these technologies are no more futuristic: They are mainstream and they are clear and present. User Experiences in Enterprise applications are defined by how intuitive the applications are… And intuition is not restricted only to its UI, it is defined by the application’s intelligence as well!
Partnerships impacting Enterprise & IT experiences across the world
Over the last decade, Think Design has been at the helm of redefining Enterprise User Experiences. Leading Enterprise product, Technology and IT Organizations have trusted Think Design for advancing their initiatives. Drop in a word or call us; and we will be happy to demonstrate why.
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