Weekly roundup: Digital Trends
COVID-19 impact in accelerating digital transformation
IN the eighteen month period since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, the global trend has shown that businesses everywhere have dramatically accelerated their digital transformation. And technology has been at the epicentre of this remarkable transformation.
Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value to customers.
According to the Enterprisers Project, an online publication and community helping IT leaders solve problems, digital transformation is also a cultural change that requires organisations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment and get comfortable with failure.
The COVID-19 impact has unintentionally compelled businesses to drastically scale-up how marketing strategies are formulated and how quickly they are implemented to meet customer needs and demands.
Evidence from the Digital Trends in Africa 2021 Report shows how fast digital transformation has occurred in African countries. It found that overall, the impact of the pandemic has been to accelerate digital transformation, as businesses move towards distributed models of employment and digital delivery of services and products. Additionally, that individuals are foregoing travel and socialising and turning to digital entertainment and communication platforms, and increasingly, to e-commerce.
As far as e-commerce in Zambia is concerned, financial inclusion in the country increased by 10.1 percentage points last year at 69.4% from 59.3% in 2015, according to the latest Finscope Survey results. Part of this growth occurred during the pandemic period in 2020.
And according to a Deloitte Insights Tech Trends 2021 Report, companies are rapidly finding innovative ways to accelerate work plans, exclusively using digital technologies.
A notable case study cited in the Report showed how Salesforce, a US-based company that offers cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions including marketing, sales and e-commerce, showed how fast the design of work.com was launched. Salesforce Senior Vice-President of Strategic Planning, Peter Schwartz, recalled that the design and launch of work.com, the company’s new product that helps businesses and communities get back to work safely, was successfully completed in one month, a process that normally takes a full year.
Indeed, as companies in Zambia and Africa at large slowly adjust to the ‘new normal’, it’s clear that the old methods of implementing work plans and marketing strategies are a thing of the past.
Digital transformation has revitalised how services are delivered.
