Digital acceleration is all about embracing new digital technologies and finding the best practices to run your enterprise’s operations efficiently.

What Is Digital Acceleration?

Digital acceleration is the process of implementing relevant, smart technologies into business processes with a ‘continuous improvement’ mindset. And rather than taking months or years for these digital adoptions, digital acceleration focuses on shortening that time-to-value by innovating at a faster pace.

Digital acceleration is digital transformation in overdrive. And with the right strategy, you can bring that acceleration into warp drive.

What should you keep in mind with digital acceleration?

Change shouldn’t be done for the sake of change; it should be done with purpose.

For businesses and organizations to achieve the best return on investment (ROI) for their digital transformation, you should look for practical deliverables and measurable goals. This will ensure your ability to launch features quickly and optimize them as they run.

Digital acceleration isn’t a one-and-done transformation. It’s an ongoing journey of improvement.

How does digital acceleration impact businesses?

Digital transformation doesn’t happen just because you’re using a few digital tools. It comes when you develop a long-term strategy for your digital investments. With technology moving at an accelerated pace, there’s tons of pressure to innovate — from rising customer expectations to investor demands. But innovation without proper planning can be ineffective at best and costly at worst.

Already, many organizations are utilizing intelligent automation (IA) for their processes, which brings together robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate entire business processes end-to-end.

These technologies may sound alien at first, but essentially, IA deploys digital workers to mimic human actions and perform tasks that would otherwise consume valuable employee time. With AI, these digital workers automate complex workflows with functionality across structured and unstructured data.

An effective digital acceleration journey will aim to connect disparate systems and departments, unifying the workforce for better overall output. But unless these organizations have a digital acceleration strategy for new technology adoption, their automation program will have difficulty scaling and achieving better business growth.

Simply said, your organization needs a business strategy.

That’s where it’s helpful to follow an operating model with a practical approach and simple steps to implement digital products effectively. We don’t believe in no-win scenarios. That’s why we developed the SS&C | Blue Prism® Robotic Operating Model (ROM™). It helps organizations determine their digital maturity and guides them through strategy, workforce, design, development and operations.

Digital innovation should be seen as a journey where the organization has a plan and purpose for any changes to their business ecosystems.

Why Is Digital Acceleration Important?

Digital acceleration helps organizations stay relevant, but it also helps meet customer demands and improve revenue, productivity and employee satisfaction.

What can digital acceleration do for me?

Without agility and adaptability in this rapidly changing business frontier, enterprises are in danger of getting lost in space. The ability to quickly incorporate new and relevant technology gives enterprises the flexibility and robustness they need to stay ahead of their competitors.

Here are specific benefits digital acceleration can bring to your enterprise:

• Scalability: With a reliable plan for your digital acceleration initiative, your organization will be better able to scale at pace. And with cloud adoption, you’ll have access to continuous updates, ensuring you’re always working with the latest capabilities.
• Profitability: Digital solutions like intelligent automation software can offer improved process performance, which helps with accuracy and increases the speed at which work is done. This improved operational efficiency will help your organization save money and free your employees’ resources for higher-value strategic initiatives.
• Agility: A unified people and digital workforce will help your organization thrive by encouraging constant innovation and the search for benefits in new technologies. By upskilling your employees, digital acceleration fosters a culture of innovation and experimentation, allowing you to launch new products, services or features rapidly to meet growing customer demand.
• Decision-making: By leveraging data analytics within your digital solutions, you can glean useful insights to inform your decision-making processes. These insights can cover a range of topics, from measuring customer behavior to identifying optimization opportunities within business processes.
• Customer-centricity: With the right digital tools and platforms, organizations can personalize customer experiences, provide seamless omnichannel experiences and even offer self-service options.

How To Plan for Digital Acceleration

Business leaders should encourage the development of a digital strategy. The digital landscape is a strange world that’s constantly evolving. That means any potential strategies should evolve with it.

How do you plan for digital acceleration?

An organized plan is crucial to businesses implementing new digital technologies, but there are other necessary steps to effectively planning your digital acceleration:

1. Gain buy-in from business executives and stakeholders. It would be highly illogical to make any digital transformation efforts without first gaining support and investment from the top. Develop a business case, including all the potential benefits and challenges of implementing new automation initiatives. Include any applicable software or tools, and the step-by-step approach your organization will need to take.
2. Stay informed on industry trends. Your strategy should be contingent on the modern business landscape. Consider the numerous opportunities for technology adoption, such as cloud computing software.
3. Set up a team. Creating a team, such as a Center of Excellence (CoE), will help determine your digital acceleration process. It’s a team of people from within the organization equipped to determine how these technologies can help achieve business solutions aligned with your business outcomes.
4. Determine where to implement digital technologies. You can start with small, manageable pursuits. Rather than worrying about the entire workflow automation, investigate the latest tech first and identify opportunities for small improvements, such as opening a new communication channel. Starting small helps the people in your organization and your customers adapt and respond to the changes and potential challenges as they arise.
5. Monitor and improve. While the foundation of digital acceleration is speed, it shouldn’t be at the sacrifice of quality. Successful digital acceleration requires continuous monitoring and tweaking. Business process management (BPM) tools allow you to check the performance of employees and digital workers within workflow automation so you can identify key areas for improvement.

Who Uses Digital Acceleration?

Businesses are keeping up with digital acceleration across industries:

• Banks are accelerating their capabilities with apps, investment services, new online banking services and natural language processing (NLP) chatbots.
• Healthcare clinicians are using their digital efforts with artificial intelligence (AI) to help with early diagnosis and prescribing treatments. Healthcare administrative staff use digital workers to onboard new patients, update patient records and schedule appointments.
• E-commerce businesses are using AI-driven marketing campaigns and adopting cloud hosting services and SaaS business models to give their customers a better digital experience.
• Insurance companies are extracting data automatically from cloud sources to analyze it using key technologies such as machine learning (ML), AI and even NLP chatbots to respond to claims.
• Telecommunications are answering customer demands sooner with chatbots and virtual agents.
• Educational institutes such as colleges and universities are transforming the learning experience with online learning, virtual classrooms, educational apps and personalized learning solutions.
• Government agencies at various levels are employing digital acceleration to improve public services, governance and citizen assistance. Digitalization initiatives are spurring development in online service portals, e-governance platforms and smart city projects.

The extent to which organizations adopt digital acceleration depends on many factors, including reach, industry, regulations, resources and digital maturity. But the final goal remains the same: implement digital technologies to future-proof their organization.

How Can I Accelerate My Digital Growth?

Organizations should always strive for ways to future-proof their operations and drive new growth. The world of digital technology is growing quickly. Rather than retreating or going into red alert, organizations need to use this acceleration to optimize workflows, minimize costs and offer better customer experiences.

Accelerating your digital automation journey will help your organization live long and prosper. Accelerate now with SS&C Blue Prism’s automation solutions.