The digital enterprise spotlight on customer experience

By Cat Yong

Software AG’s annual global conference held in San Francisco this year, is themed around “Powering the Digital Enterprise.” Whilst, ‘digital enterprise’ was a phrase/concept that was mentioned repeatedly during last year’s conference, this year, Software AG’s view of it started to take a more tangible shape with a more discernible direction and objective.

Accenture Technology Lab’s Managing Director Edy Liongsari had opined during day 2 of the conference that business and technology are no longer separate. “Without technology, business would be blind. Every business is a digital business.”

Even analyst companies like Gartner view that every business has to become digital, and in effect become a digital enterprise. The first few examples that come to mind, would definitely be Internet-based companies like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and so on. But, companies in other verticals, and especially companies/verticals that have a mature level of IT adoption, are well positioned to take advantage of digitisation.

So, what is a digital enterprise?

Software AG’s Chief Marketing Officer, Ivo Totev said, “In my opinion, the digital enterprise is one that totally focuses on the customer, it totally focuses on solutions that are differentiating and which give a very tailored customer experience.”

Ivo Totev

This applies to consumer-facing industries like retail, airlines and so on, but even also B2B type organisations like GE Energy, a division of General Electric, that see they need to leverage digitisation to better serve their business customers.

Total addressable market
Totev explained, “I think every company around the globe with minimum revenues of USD500 million have to think how to better engage their customers. They are many who don’t, so the market is super huge.”

He opined that the answer is to create differentiating solutions, on top of their existing IT landscape and he also observed that most companies do not have these solutions. For example the retail market being able to dynamically price based on fast moving information that tries to predict as accurately as possible, demand for products and services.

The SoftwareAG suite offers an agility layer on top of an organisation’s existing IT, that claims to be able to help customers create these type of solutions.

System of records
Traditional back end system of records have ‘monopolised’ IT’s attention and IT budgets for long enough.

Totev said, “Customers have discovered they spend so much money on say, an ERP solution, and it helps with automating back offices and offer a good glimpse of finance. But we have reached the point where further optimising these solutions and applications, does not add value anymore. Whether it takes 5 steps or 6 steps to put an invoice into a system, is not really a big difference anymore. It has lost impact.”

A top business priority is to generate revenue and Totev opined  that this does not happen by improving finance systems or data warehousing. Not to mention, system of records also tend to be big installations that take a lot of time and money.

Totev said, “With the progression of technology and innovation, customers are now in a position to create unique customer-facing solutions, in 3 to 4 months, and track immediately how it works, so that within a year, you can measure it, improve it and get a business benefit.

“This is a totally new experience for businesses, to see IT delivering something in 3-6 months, with improved versions, as opposed to a 3-year IT project that may or may not work.”

Fitting the pieces together
The marketing chief explained what Software AG offers by saying, “We have evolved above and beyond business processes. It is a very important part of our DNA, but we are doing more these days.

“You need to be able to understand your IT landscape, to know what to do when you need a new solution, you need to speak about process and process management with Aris, you need to be able to create new solutions to automate these processes and integrate to this IT landscape, and you need transparency into how it is working with analytics and dashboarding.

“And last but not least, there is a lot of data which you need to inspect very quickly, to react in real-time. This is why today we speak about the digital enterprise with different entry points and business processes is one of them, but it is by far not the only one now. “

Top challenges
Not all companies are convinced about the digital enterprise proposition, however.

Totev explained, “Companies that understand they need to become consumable by mobile and play in the social space, need to get onto the road to the digital enterprise. But others will say, they do not need it.

“I would question, what would happen to them in 5 to 10 years.”

*Enterprise IT News was a guest of Software AG to Innovation World 2013, in San Francisco from 7th Oct-11th Oct.*