Digital technologies have emerged as the most fundamental tools for the survival of businesses in the fiercely-competitive modern marketplace. Implementation of modern technologies helps achieve the most desirable business objectives. However, the adoption of innovations to facilitate digital transformation also brings cybersecurity challenges too.

What does a movie about baseball have to do with digital transformation strategy? If you’ve ever seen the film, Money Ball, it’s the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A‘s baseball team, who’s charged with a Herculean task—building a winning baseball team on a shoestring budget. But since he’s pretty good at math, he pioneers the field of sabermetrics—the empirical analysis of baseball stats to find players with untapped potential.

The term ’digital transformation‘ is a lot like love. It means different things depending on who you ask. IBM, a long-standing technology leader, offers this mouthful: “us AI, automation, hybrid cloud and other digital technologies to leverage data and drive intelligent workflows, faster and smarter decision-making, and real-time response to market disruptions.” Still kind of nebulous, huh?

The ways in which most businesses now operate and interact with customers is drastically different from what they were a few years ago. For example, customers can research their options, learn about other brands, and make purchases all from the comfort of their own homes. And though this has meant a lot of change and adjustment for businesses, many of those changes have been for the better. This is because digital transformation and customer experience influence each other.

Regardless of the type of business you're talking about, organizations invest in digital transformation for a myriad of different reasons. Some turn to the power of modern technology to improve efficiency - empowering employees to communicate from department to department easier than ever before. Others want to guarantee that data can flow freely across the enterprise, making sure that the critical information that people need to do their jobs is always in the right hands.

Deploying new technology can improve productivity and dramatically reduce waste, but may introduce hidden costs as well.

​​When the pandemic first disrupted business as usual, Zendesk was one of the earliest adopters of the new normal. “I think we were one of the very first organizations to make the decision that all of our sales were going to be 100 percent remote indefinitely,” says Monica Telles, VP of Zendesk Sell.

Even now, lots of businesses first design their website to work on laptops and desktops. Afterwards, they will also make sure those same sites function well enough on phones and tablets, almost like an afterthought. Surprisingly, that's what most people mean when they discuss responsive website design. In an era when even Google has advocated for mobile-first development, such a cart-before-the-horse approach doesn't signal digital transformation leadership.