With the intermingling of social media platforms in all aspects of our lives, the digital world has become more multifaceted and complex.Social platforms combined with cloud systems and mobility has disrupted the existing business models and forced enterprises to develop new business models to generate fresh revenue streams and find new ways to engage with their customers. But to be really competitive in this new market place, enterprises need to wholeheartedly embrace digital models and systems.

Challenges of digital transformation

To become a truly digital enabled company and to successfully launch digital services, organizations need to embrace digital processes within the organization as well. The challenge here is that all enterprises are not IT ready. In some organizations the current systems may need to be overhauled, upgraded and, in some cases, completely discarded to successfully transition to digital.

The second challenge is that, businesses can no longer point out their customers with any certainty; they don’t know who these new consumers will be or how they will access the organization’s services and products. Add to this, the digital divide that exists in our diverse country, with 22 official languages only 16% of the population speaks English. With over a billion users, mobile phones are the biggest connectivity tool across the country, but not everyone has access to smartphones and the Internet. To directly connect this diverse customer base to services, enterprises need to create a completely different kind of business model.

CIOs driving the digital transformation

Across industries, the business landscape has moved online; the retail industry has embraced Ecommerce; healthcare, insurance and banking industries have seen an upsurge on their digital platforms and with the advent of Aadhar and various government service portals,e-Governance is making services available to all citizens.

To succeed in this online world of business, CIOs need to take a 360-degree approach to understanding their customers, they have to design and deploy a business model that creates a unified customer experience.

CIOs will need to take charge and create a long-term roadmap to make their organizations future-ready.Ultimately it will be their visions and projections that will enable business growth in the next decade.