How digital disruption can drive business innovation

Businesses are currently facing times of digital disruption and change. This can be uncomfortable, especially if these changes are sudden and your organisation isn’t prepared. However businesses are becoming more aware and refocusing to become a part of this new digital age. Artificial intelligence in customer service and automation across B2B marketing campaigns are great examples of this.

What are businesses doing to ensure purposeful innovation and secure business scalability? What are the current trends your business can follow to do the same? And, what part does agile methodologies play in this digital disruption mentality? This blog will take you through how your business can effectively implement digital disruption methodologies in today’s busy and ever-changing landscape.

Innovate and grow through digital disruption

10% of businesses now have more than 200 apps in their enterprise information-technology systems. The number of apps used by organisations around the world has increased by 68%, with an average of 129 apps per business. In fact, the enterprise software market is expected to reach U.S. $545 million by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.15%. How do these facts link into how businesses can innovate and scale through the adoption of a digitally disruptive mentality?

Digital disruption is “an effect that changes the fundamental expectations and behaviours in a market, process or industry that is caused by digital capabilities, channels or assets.” These digital business processes that are cognitively time-consuming for your employees can lead to issues such as missed growth opportunities and even have an impact on your overall business efficiency metrics. Digital disruption can help with this. It’s also a transformative approach which allows businesses to become more innovative and efficient. It’s also an opportunity to better your business model and lead to opportunities for growth and scalability.

Digital disruption can be likened to disruptive innovation; the ability to adapt to necessary digital change to better your business overall.

A great example of disruptive digital innovation is the rise of remote work. The pandemic saw businesses having to quickly adapt to necessary organisational changes in order to survive:

• 93% of companies had to shift to remote work
• 62% had to deal with increasing customer demand for online purchase and services
• 34% increased the migration of their company’s assets to the cloud.

And the results of this digital disruption? Productivity levels actually increased by 47% with employees working from home.

So, how can your business manage digital disruption as the opportunity presents itself?

Innovation resistance

Disruptive innovation is a team effort. Complete business alignment and organisational cohesion is key. There will be employees who will resist change, whether that be one simple digital process or an organisation-wide. It all comes down to the way you plan to approach this change. Make sure you and your teams understand the why, how and what of these disruptions. They are meant to disrupt what is currently happening and ultimately benefit them and your business long term.

Some disruptive digital innovation requires a lot of user experience or UX work, but with the right people and proper planning, these projects can be broken down and efficiently managed.

Say no to shortcuts

Disruptive digital innovation can be costly and it may seem that, right now, your business doesn’t have the time. But, if you were to compare the benefits vs the costs with implementing, say, artificial intelligence in customer service, the long-term effects make it worthwhile.

Why not consider hiring additional administrative support to allow you to free up your project management teams time to keep things on track.

Digital disruption trends

Whether you want to implement new digital processes to avoid potential missed business opportunities or are interested in disruptive innovation, here are a few digital disruption trends to get you started.

AI and big data

Looking for a quantitative and qualitative view of your business? How can you track and identify trends in your market to then translate this information into creating better services for your clients? Understanding big data and artificial intelligence is a step in the right direction to getting there. It’s easy to get tangled in big data, so collect and analyse data with a purpose - know what information you need and how you’re going to use it.

Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) applications is a great starting point to mastering big data. AI is able to find connections amongst datasets, identify data types and recognise information using natural language processing. It can increase efficiencies, improve the quality of data for relevant business strategies and data modeling while assisting in the efficient automation and acceleration of data-related tasks.

Personalisation, Personalisation, Personalisation

Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to engage with a company if it offers personalised experiences based on consumer interests and preferences?

There exists various digital applications and tools that can help track consumer behaviour to plan personalisation techniques accordingly. These tools can identify and recommend products to customers based on previous purchases or "wishlist" items. Example tools include Optin Monster, Proof, Yusp, HubSpot, Segment, Bronto, BrightInfo and Episerver.

Smarter resourcing strategies

Outsourcing or offshoring companies are experts at digital disruption. They understand the significant business benefits that can come from cloud-based operations.

The global market size of outsourced services in 2019 was valued at U.S. $92.5 billion, with the leading driver for this growth being the 59% share of businesses that turn to outsourcing to reduce costs. Businesses can use outsourcing to help navigate sudden increases in demand, market changes, and to deliver on organisational goals.

Agile business: foster adaptability

How do agile business methodologies work hand-in-hand with digital disruption? Agile methodologies help businesses adapt to changes in business scopes and deliverables when implementing disruptive innovation. Handling digital business transformations in an “agile way” gives your organisation the ability to manage changes in priorities within a highly volatile or unstable environment. Agile perfectly works alongside disruption; always changing and adapting to market changes instead of limiting it.

Businesses that embrace agile methodologies when considering digital disruption, will sustain a competitive advantage long term. These advantages include:

• An increase in ‘market change’ business reaction times
• The ability to adapt and mitigate risk as it comes
• Overall project management for both non-technical and technical teams
• An increase in control without risking micro-management
• Continuous improvement opportunities.

What’s next?

IDC predicts that by 2025, 75% of the world’s population will interact with data every day, and each connected person will have at least one data interaction every 18 seconds. This digital transformation - the integration of technology, or intelligent data, into everything we do - is bringing about enormous change in the way businesses operate and interact with their customers.

It is now crucial for organisations to invest in digital technologies and products to keep up with the demands of the “always-connected” consumer. Digital solutions that allow them to respond more quickly and deliver a better customer experience are more important than ever in order to remain competitive.