That’s why digital acceleration makes more sense in the current scheme of things, as it highlights the need for scaling up the digital resources of companies everywhere but in the fastest possible way. It’s not that digital acceleration is the same as country email list a digital transformation but faster. Digital acceleration also implies a new approach to how the adoption of new digital technologies is implemented.
Leaving Behind the Old Approach
If we were to understand digital acceleration as a quick digital transformation, then the process would mean updating highly complex systems and infrastructures or replacing them with upgraded alternatives in a short period of time. While that would be great, it’s also impossible.
Finding appropriate replacements for legacy systems more often than not means developing them from scratch, which can take a lot everyone wants to increase product success of time depending on the system’s complexity. Updating existing assets is equally tricky and the “need-it-ASAP” vibe that’s keeping the business world on edge today doesn’t help, as it pushes developers to work too quickly with outdated technologies, multiplying the potential risks and issues.
So, the approach that has companies scrambling to update their core technologies to achieve a successful digital transformation doesn’t cut it anymore. This means that we have to leave that old approach behind – or, at the very least, put it aside for calmer times when a slower digital adoption is more bearable. What should we put in its place to drive a true digital acceleration process, then? Data.
The Data-Driven Approach
As this article from BCG masterfully proposes, the new approach should decouple the digital business transformation from the core IT buy lead transformation. The idea is to see the digital acceleration process as composed of two separate transformations. On one hand, we would have the more traditional transformation: updating core systems and enriching the digital infrastructure with new tools. On the other hand, there would be a novel data layer that could provide the needed agility and the proper insights to deliver fast value.
Such a decoupling would allow a company to work on the needed revamp of core technologies while gaining value from data they already have. That sounds nice but there’s an inevitable question waiting in there: how can that data be actionable if the underlying systems aren’t up to date and, in fact, are mostly an obstacle to its proper use? The answer is actually fairly simple: by creating an alternative architecture on the cloud.