DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – A Roadmap for Success

Written by Shiam Mohammed

Today's business and technological landscape is quickly changing and evolving as it seeks to adapt to the new normal. Legacy systems and business practices may not be in alignment with the world we live in.

Thus, digital transformation leads to an organization becoming data-driven, empowering businesses and people to make decisions and solve many business problems. It applies to every area of business and technology in every area of the globe, and is of utmost relevance and importance to our local context. It involves alignment with business and technology.

Its benefits include increased speed, transparency and trust, significantly reduced costs, and streamlined/ enhanced business processes, to name a few. It involves companies gaining deep insights into best practices of developing and implementing innovative solutions and processes that meet and exceed benchmarks/ standards. Slow inefficient business processes are a thing of the past with digital transformation and its related key areas such as data science, fintech and artificial intelligence.

It requires relevant frameworks, cohesive teams and guiding principles for success. It involves strategies to get people ready to listen to data, creating a change in culture, behaviours, and mindset to make data-driven business decisions, rather than rely on intuition.

It solves identified operational and strategic problems such as making suboptimal investment decisions, improving customer satisfaction and customer relationship management, improving marketing and customer targeting, inefficient processes, and using intuition rather than facts, evidence and actionable data insights to drive decisions.

Digital transformation applies to every industry imaginable such as finance, real estate, insurance, healthcare, to name a few. For example, supermarkets can enhance and optimize their supply chains which result in accurate forecasting/ predicting of demand and supply so as to prevent resource wastage, optimize warehousing, reduce costs, and have relevant and real-time data to be able to offer incentives and discounts for products that may be close to expiration, detect and predict stakeholder and customer preferences, and also be able to quickly adapt to changing circumstances.

Another example is in the real estate industry where it can significantly enhance all the relevant processes with speed, accuracy, and accountability. Real estate stakeholders can also predict the future value of property for investment decisions based on data insights provided by data science and machine learning algorithms.

Digital transformation justifies how businesses can successfully leverage these innovative business practices and technologies such as data science, fintech, artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, and data analytics to deliver operational and strategic value to stakeholders in the ecosystem. Companies that do not embark on digital transformation initiatives risk becoming quickly outdated, inefficient and ineffective, with their competitors keeping ahead and outpacing them at every step of the race.

Meet the Facilitator:

Shiam Mohammed

Shiam Mohammed has more than eighteen years’ experience teaching at the tertiary level. He has lectured many subjects in the Information Technology, Business and Real Estate disciplines at various institutions. He has also facilitated University of London (LSE) BSc. programmes, and is currently a lecturer and practicum adviser at UWI-ROYTEC.

He has many years of valuable work experience as an IT Manager, Networks Administrator, IT/ Communications Administrator, ICT consultant and IT Analyst in the hotel, safety, insurance and other business sectors. He is also actively involved in real estate sales and services, and IT consultancy and is a member of Rotary International.

Mr. Mohammed is a graduate/ alumni of the University of London(LSE) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and also holds several professional and internationally recognised Information Technology certifications from ISACA, COMPTIA, MICROSOFT, CISCO and EC-Council, to name a few. He is pursuing his second MSc: in Network Security from Anglia Ruskin University UK.

He has successfully completed an executive qualification in Blockchain Technologies: Business Innovation and Application from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also has qualifications in Cybersecurity from Harvard University, and Artificial Intelligence from MIT.