Is Digital Transformation still relevant? Yes, according to a recent McKinsey report, “89 percent of large companies globally have a digital and AI transformation journey underway, but they’ve captured only 31 percent of expected revenue lift and 25 percent of expected cost savings.” Companies are spending a lot on digital transformation! In 2022, spending was close to 2 trillion USD, and is set to reach $3.9 trillion by 2027. 

Digital transformation refers to the process of integrating digital technology into all areas of a business or organization, just adopting new technologies, but also reshaping organizational culture, processes, and strategies to leverage data and enhance customer experiences. This initiative promotes the use of data insights to drive strategic decisions and better meet business goals. Digital transformation streamlines and automates workflows to increase efficiency and reduce costs. It aims to improve customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and enable a competitive advantage. Recently digital transformation is focused on the integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analytics to drive innovation and business growth.

Transformation in any organization must come from the top, with leaders taking ownership and ensuring commitment from the different teams within the organization. There should also be alignment when it comes to expectations and the initiatives pursued by the organization and members so that processes can be prioritized easily. After the process is standardized, regular tracking is essential; the ongoing impact of all changes implemented must be assessed regularly to determine next steps.

Digital transformations are never easy, and are even more challenging than traditional change efforts. Without the proper planning and analysis of your business needs and existing computing platforms, the benefits of a complete and successful digital transformation cannot be fully realized. 

Leaving Legacy Without Leaving Legacy Software

Although digital transformations may seem drastic in nature, transformation doesn’t necessarily mean leaving behind existing systems and migrating to the latest and greatest. You don’t have to rip-and-replace in order to modernize your architecture. The first step in every transformation—digital or not—should always be determining what still works and what’s missing. Often, you’ll discover that modernization of legacy systems is the best, and simplest, way to go.

Which data architectures are best designed to enable a smooth digital transformation effort?

Data architectures are essential for meeting the specialized needs of modern organizations, applying advanced analytics, and using data and AI at scale. They describe how your data will be managed using the models, policies, rules, and standards set by your organization. Data architectures help you plan for new deployment and application requirements as your business grows.

Implementing a digital transformation process involves a variety of technologies, which can include cloud computing, IoT, API-Based Integrations, AI and ML among others. Unifying and managing the data for all these components and systems requires a robust, proven solution.

Let’s examine the digital integration hub – a data architecture that’s specifically designed to drive your digital transformation initiatives by addressing the challenges in delivering highly available, high throughput and responsive application programming interfaces (API’s) while reducing the workload on Systems of Record (SoRs).

About Digital Integration Hubs (DIHs) 

A Digital Integration Hub (DIH) is a data architecture that decouples digital applications from the SoRs, and aggregates operational data into a low-latency data fabric. This architecture helps organizations connect, integrate, and manage various software applications and systems. It acts as a central hub for managing the flow of data between different systems and enables organizations to more easily exchange data and automate business processes. A digital integration hub supports modernization initiatives by providing a decoupled API layer that effectively supports modern on-line applications.

A DIH can also power migration to the cloud and support hybrid deployments, which is highly relevant when organizations want to continue to leverage their on-premise operational systems, and when sensitive data cannot be moved to the public cloud. Additionally, A DIH enables data integration and analytics to help in the quick and efficient management of big data, allowing for real-time operational reporting on fresh data. Depending on the current architecture of your existing data processing platforms, a DIH can be the best solution for your digital transformation initiatives.

Why Do You Need a DIH?

A key benefit of a Digital Integration Hub architecture is accelerating innovation by enabling the rapid development and launching of new digital applications and digital services. Developers don’t need to synchronize data between the application, the cache and the systems of record. All relevant data is easily accessible in a single data management layer via modern protocols.

In addition, conventional architectures can’t accommodate gradual modernization strategies of systems of record because the systems are tightly coupled. Imagine if your many applications are each accessing multiple systems of records, all calling the APIs directly in order to access the data. Modernizing even one system of record means you have to make changes to these digital applications all at once. This will require a lot of effort, slowing time-to-market while increasing the risk of error.

A DIH will also ensure increased throughput, reduced latency and always-on applications by decoupling the API services from the SoRs. The DIH replicates real-time system-of-record data into a high performance data management layer. This supports highly responsive modern digital services, open banking initiatives, customer 360, analytics and BI on operational data and more.

With an out-of-the box DIH such as SmartDIH, you can realize the full benefits of the modern application architecture in a unified platform. Offering open platform design, this platform delivers ease of use and flexibility, with the option to expose data services via no-code SQL or develop complex Java-based data services. Leveraging event-driven architecture and CDC technology, SmartDIH powers real-time workloads with fresh, consistent 24×7 data. This solution, visualized below, offers superb performance with in-memory computing, smart tiering & distributed architecture, that enables thousands of TPS with ms latency.

A proven DIH such as Smart DIH can help your organization:

• Deploy new applications and services quickly and efficiently
• Address slow response times experienced by end users
• Ensure always-on services
• Scale to support peak volumes while avoiding over-provisioning of expensive on-prem hardware
• Ensure that applications support high user concurrency
• Replicate data effectively across sites and regions in real-time
• Accelerate data ingestion and processing times
• Ensure compatibility of infrastructure with hybrid and multi cloud architectures

Last Words

As data volumes become larger and more complex, businesses are left with the choice of either ignoring the benefits of digital transformation or stepping up to the challenge and gaining a competitive edge in the market. Successful digital transformations are rooted in a rethinking of the familiar approaches to data processing. With an out-of-the box such as SmartDIH, you can realize the full benefits of the modern application architecture in a unified platform, that will help you avoid the complexities of integrating multiple components and greatly accelerate time-to-market.