The Top Digital Transformation Trends to Know for 2022

2020 was the year of realization for every industry as the pandemic revealed various shortcomings and roadblocks. Many businesses also realized the need to grow from their legacy processes and adopt the digital-first approach. In continuation to our digital transformation guide, this article will cover the various trends in digital transformation. 

These trends will help you plan your digital initiatives by understanding these trends and what other digital transformation technologies can be part of your overall strategy.  

Why digital transformation is important?

As many as 90 percent of enterprises are yet to achieve their digital-first goals, while 45 percent lost productivity during the Covid-19 crisis due to connectivity problems. – Business Standard 

Before the pandemic hit, retail, financial services, and telco industries were unaware they would be the most affected. The reason being they had far more in-person customer experiences than digital ones. Companies lacking the digital approach saw their processes fall apart after the regime of remote working came into play. 

The most important aspect of digital transformation lies in its capability to streamline the processes and make them manageable. Digital transformation completely disrupts an organization, yet it is upon the businesses leaders if they want to do it one process at a time or not. It helps businesses disrupt their processes, workflow, and systems by bringing the previously siloed data together and binding the entire operations into a centralized one. 

With digital transformation an organization wants to

• have better coordination and collaboration,
• improve customer engagement,
• extract better insights from their organizational data, and
• increase overall productivity.

Let’s go over some of the trends that will influence a company’s digital transformation initiative.

Top digital transformation trends for 2022

In 2022, the digital transformation trends will be heavily influenced by the adoption of digital technology so that they can

1. Become more agile

CIOs will expand agile practices across marketing, operations, finance, HR, and sales departments. They will be reshaping their business models and changing the company culture that quickly accepts evolution.

2. Use low-code for better customer and employee experience

By implementing a mixture of low-code, remote process automation, and integration technologies, business leaders will seamlessly build and manage large-scale customer and employee experiences.

3. Build multi-cloud architecture

Multi-cloud environments will help IT departments manage system resources and Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds to enable low-latency workloads on edge computing.

4. Use real-time data processing

New cloud architectures will help businesses update massive amounts of data, use open-source data platforms, real-time data streaming platforms, event-driven architectures, and scale on-demand.

Factors influencing digital transformation trends

Let’s look at some of the factors that will influence digital trends and help digital transformation initiatives. 

1. Blockchain will play into digital transformation

Blockchain will play a crucial role in providing the best digital experience for enterprises moving towards hybrid cloud and cloud-native applications. Blockchain increases transaction transparency for everyone while also assisting with data resiliency and security.

2. More adoption of hybrid working

Changing workplace norms is pushing enterprises to get their teams on the cloud for better virtual coordination and productivity tracking. More companies will look forward to using products and services that will allow them to implement their digital-first initiative.

3. 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) will speed up things

5G promises faster connectivity, and the technology that will benefit most from it is IoT. The industrial internet of things will gain the most from this move. IoT provides better opportunities to organizations across industries as it collects new data, turns that data into insights using big data analytics, and lets business leaders make decisions on them. 

This entire process of collecting, processing, and creating insights will be made faster and more reliable with the infusion of 5G. 

4. Data protection and cybersecurity will take priority 

Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg came under heavy scrutiny due to massive security violations done by Facebook, which affected around 50 million Facebook users. Apart from social channels like Facebook, other major companies and government agencies also experienced privacy failures due to data breaches. 

In 2022, security will take center stage and be heavily driven by technology like blockchain. With security-by-default becoming a necessity, organizations already recognize security as a significant trust factor.

5. Augmented reality and virtual reality will drive business transformation

VR hardware is easily available due to its affordability and advances in AR technology. Businesses will gain various benefits like cost cut down and improved productivity. Many brands can stand apart from their competitors and connect with customers in new and exciting ways by introducing VR and AR, ergo the Pepsi bus stop marketing campaign. 

6. Businesses will leverage transformation via machine learning and artificial intelligence

AI and ML can assist businesses to transform their operations with machine data analysis and produce better insights. These insights can come in handy in empowering enterprises to accelerate their processes by identifying areas of improvement. 

AI and ML will complement the simulation of human intelligence, which will significantly bring accuracy while also reducing errors, time, and efforts. 

7. Automation with Robotic Processes (RPA)

At its core, RPA infuses bots, chatbots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for automating repetitive tasks. It also helps organizations streamline their workflows across multiple functions. 

RPA can tackle extensive operational challenges with its capabilities, such as executing large amounts of back-office activities. By merging Big Data Analytics with RPA, organizations can acquire better information about their business patterns and workflows performance. 

RPA software bots can simulate employee actions like clicks, copy, and pasting to complex tasks such as bank reconciliations. RPA can also work well with CRMs, ERPs, and legacy systems.

Businesses can automate many extensive back-office tasks and enable their workforce to focus on other high-level and high-value activities that can positively impact their revenue growth.

Conclusion: Drive your organization’s digital adoption initiative with an expert 

We hope this article highlighted the digital transformation trends and the technology that complements them. Inducting and infusing technology into business processes is crucial for leaders that want to achieve their dream of becoming a digital business.

The right technology stack, strategy, roadmap, and expert are the critical ingredients for a successful digital transformation initiative. Rapidops is an experienced and skilled player in providing thorough digital transformation services to its clients. 

If you want to discuss the opportunities we can create for you via impactful digital products, then do connect with us. We’d love to help you embark on the journey of becoming a digitally-driven organization.