Digital Transformation for Digital-Native Businesses

Searce is a Business Reporter client.

Digital transformation is about real change from old to new in pursuit of value generation in a changing landscape. Large enterprises often embark upon digital transformation to stay relevant in the face of new and evolving challenges. These common sets of challenges range from legacy systems to legacy processes, culture and/or mindset.

While the above is true for large enterprises, digital transformation has a different meaning in the context of digital-native businesses. Digital natives are those businesses that have been established in the last 10 years and use the digital medium as their primary mechanism of value creation. They don’t suffer from legacy baggage.

Digital-native businesses share the following common technological characteristics that shape their digital transformation needs:

• Use of public cloud for infrastructure operations
• Strive for state-of-the-art DevOps setup in their context
• Value depth over breadth in technology skills
• Operate as lean tech teams
• Non-hierarchical and fast-decision-making
  

Digital natives use cloud computing along with modern practices such as agile and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). However, like any business, these companies still need to evolve with technology. And in a world where technology changes so quickly, this is difficult; IT architecture becomes slow and inconvenient, costs escalate, security vulnerabilities appear from nowhere, data volumes explode and they cost more and more to store.

Transforming digital natives

Digitally native businesses are highly technical, but usually in specialist areas. They may be “born in the cloud,” but many struggle to leverage the full potential of emerging tech such as cloud, data and AI.

The following are the four key technological challenges on their continuous transformation journey:

1. Acquiring and retaining relevant technical talent
2. Keeping up with technological advancements; cloud, data and AI are evolving at an exponential pace, making it impossible to stay on top of everything
3. Adhering to best practices while growing 10 times; easy to lose sight of fundamental technical principles, resulting in overgrown and complex architecture with higher running costs
4. Engaging tech consulting partners with relevant technical skills to increase net value

The cloud technology available changes constantly. The advent of containers and Kubernetes means that more can be done with fewer resources and at a lower cost. For digital natives, the cloud’s ever-changing benefits are significant. Previously, cloud service providers only provided infrastructure; currently, they offer a full range of services, including infrastructure management. This relieves its clients of labor and allows them to focus on value creation rather than mundane responsibilities like keeping the lights on.

Helping digital natives scale faster

Digital natives need to free themselves from the constraints of technological self-sufficiency if they are to achieve high levels of growth. Digitally native businesses need to accelerate using emerging technologies such as automation and machine learning. By partnering with third parties who have specialist skills, they will be able to make the most of the efficiencies that emerging technologies offer.

Working with specialist third parties with in-depth knowledge of emerging technological opportunities is a powerful way for these businesses to increase effectiveness and reduce operational risks.

It takes a digital native to understand a digital native. Searce is a Google Cloud Platform-focused cloud-native consulting firm. Searce works with digital-native businesses all over the world to help them expand 10 times faster by leveraging cloud, data and artificial intelligence. Visit Searce.com to learn more about Searce.

— Industry view from Searce

All things considered, even advanced digital natives can’t expect to know everything about everything. Need a partner who will help you RAMP by #SolvingforBetter? Visit searce.com to learn more about Searce Inc.