Digital transformation - probably the most used two words in the English language when it comes to business. However, as much as it is used, it is near impossible to define as Dan Scarfe, UK founder at New Signature, told CBR TV.
“Digital Transformation is one of those wonderful phrases which can mean anything to any person. Every organisation such as ourselves is talking about digital transformation and how it can impact on your organisation,” he said.
Digital transformation has been a concept on the business strategy roadmap for a good many years now, with the concept so hard to define as it is constantly evolving and changing with advances in digital technology. New Signature, however, has observed a distinct change in the approach to digital transformation:
“The real change that we are seeing is starting to actually take some of that theory and put it into reality – what does digital transformation really mean to my organisation? For us it’s all about how we can turn that into new products and services. How can we serve our employees better? How can we deliver better services to customers? That for us is what digital transformation is. This year it is all about taking it from theory to practice,” Scarfe told CBR TV.
As businesses embark on transformative change, the New Signature UK founder believes that the competitive edge will be found in the software an organisation uses. Gone are the days of picking a generic solution off the shelf, with bespoke services giving companies differentiation in their market. Indeed, it will be the companies that harness technology and put software at the core of transformation who will find the most success.
Microsoft Azure is a prime example when it comes to enabling companies to transform and innovate, having itself undergone significant change in recent times.
“The biggest change to the Azure world in the last twelve months is the actual rate of change in itself. It used to be there were separate product groups inside Microsoft, each building their own solution. Azure is now the new centre of gravity inside Microsoft,” said Scarfe.
Azure also has embraced the pivot away from infrastructure to platform, something which Sacarfe said was “kind of ironic seeing as that’s where Azure started in the first place.”
“We have seen a real change now away from lifting and shifting traditional infrastructure, through to how we can start to leverage new patterns such as DevOps to actually enable this software development lifecycle and enable organisations to bring new software to market much more quickly then they might have before - using containers, using serverless, using all of these new capabilities which are available on the Azure platform,” Scarfe told CBR TV.
