Over the past few decades, the pace at which we have all adopted digital technologies in our day-to-day lives has accelerated rapidly.
Smartphones and tablets have meant we are all connected digi-tally in our personal lives, while new technologies and practices have disrupted the way we work.
Consequently, companies the world over have recognised and embraced the importance of tak-ing their products, services and processes online, often led by a digital transformation – a com-plete digital overhaul of the way a business operates.
Of course, companies have been undertaking such transfor-mations since at least the 1980s, introducing Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relation-ship Management systems, shift-ing data into the cloud, and gradually incorporating machine learning and Artificial Intelli-gence systems.
Yet since the start of the pan-demic, the pace of these transfor-mations has accelerated rapidly, with a raft of digital develop-ments, both internal and external, as companies have come to re-place the physical with the virtual, often out of sheer necessity.
So, in the wake of all this change, what does “digital trans-formation” mean today? And how has the journey changed over the past 18 months in particular?
At the Reimagination Thought Leaders Summit 2022, the Australian Computer So-ciety’s premier tech leadership and networking event, industry experts from leading software, travel and health companies ad-dressed this very question, offer-ing insights into what they have learned from their own digital transformation journeys, includ-ing everything from the impacts they have witnessed to the techni-cal challenges they encountered along the way.
Common to all of them was the principle that a successful digital transformation must go hand-in-hand with a concurrent business and cultural transformation.
“At the end of the day, techno-logy is just an enabler,” says Mi-chelle Ash, CEO of GEOVIA at Dassault Systemes.