The COVID-19 pandemic had several effects on the business landscape this year, but the need to revisit digital transformation efforts and strategies is one that’s been acutely felt by every company worldwide. Business leaders are under immense pressure to take decisive actions and make the bets on investments that will pay off—all while delicately balancing employee and business needs with capitalizing on emerging opportunities. As a result, business agility, as well as the employee and customer experience, have become even more paramount to success. 

We continue to learn to adapt and adjust as needed. Doing so for many organizations can be a challenge. But the evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) can help companies embrace the tenets to ensure that employees are engaged and customers tended to. This type of organization harnesses automation and applies intelligence to remain agile in the face of change, build growth with customer-centric strategies and employ actionable insights at every turn to deliver on the innovation needed for success. 

The five pillars of an Autonomous Digital Enterprise

ADE is the future state of business — one where agile, customer-centric, insight-driven companies bring their A-game to evolve all aspects of their business to compete and succeed amid disruption. Success is built around developing new, technology-enabled operating models that: 

• Deliver a transcendent customer experience, giving customers and employees what they need by making technology feel more human – from enabling do-it-yourself experiences to recognizing mobile devices as a primary channel to leveraging analytics and orchestration for a frictionless experience. 
• Apply automation everywhere by embracing hyper-automation, operations automation, and enterprise service management to drive automated business processes as a complementary business function working with human employees for greater efficiency with speed and accuracy.
• Support enterprise DevOps in driving continuous improvement by pushing the principles of DevOps processes across the entire organization to drive business agility, optimize for constant delivery of applications and services, and embrace cultural and behavioral change for a frictionless environment. 
• Drive data-based business outcomes to create value from assets by adopting a mindset that supports a systematic approach to data strategy, architecture, operations, and execution. Where decisions are supported by the data that runs the business today and can predict opportunities in the future.
• Safeguard the organization through adaptive cybersecurity with security functions that can automatically sense, detect, and respond to access requests, authentication needs, inside and outside threats, and meet regulatory compliance to provide a holistic approach to cybersecurity for speed and agility.

How BMC is propelling the ADE forward

More than just a business philosophy, ADE is a way of life that breathes innovation into companies in every industry and across geographies. It’s a crucial piece to our corporate ethos and we infuse it into everything we do, from creating new products and solutions to how we operate within our broader business ecosystem. We continue to focus on applying intelligence and automation to reinvent our customers’ technology transformations. 

For example, during our BMC Exchange 2020 virtual event in October, we featured several compelling stories from our customers to highlight their unique ADE journeys. We were excited to announce that Tampa General Hospital (TGH) had begun using our application workflow orchestration solution, Control-M, to help monitor intensive care capacity and conditions as part of efforts to combat COVID-19 across a network of healthcare providers and hospitals in the region. 

With the Control-M solution, TGH is accessing near real-time capacity and demand insights, providing a critical overview of the region’s ability to respond to the pandemic. Along with over 50 hospitals in the Tampa Bay area, TGH can now automate the aggregation, analytics, and reporting of much-needed hospital information, providing hospital personnel with important insights 5 hours faster than previously possible. They can also monitor Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed counts, ventilators, and other resources needed to fight COVID-19 and treat those affected. 

The pandemic’s effects pushed organizations like TGH, and all of us, to rethink how we do things in every aspect of business – from creating new innovations to how we invest and how we reinvent what we do for greater value. We’re in a pivotal stage where reinvestment is critical but requires reinvention through creative thinking and insight-driven action.

How you can reinvent to reinvest

The Accenture Technology Vision 2020 report highlights that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated three years of digital and cultural transformation into three months. As we embark on a new year and continue to navigate ongoing shifts, every business is realizing the value of a more technology-driven strategy to stay competitive. But a clear strategy is only as effective as its execution. People, products and processes need to come together to deploy transformation strategies that work. 

• People: A top challenge has been the ability to foster innovation and create a collaboration culture remotely. Leaders need to source feedback from employees to understand how and where they can support their work and improve processes via automation that may be holding them back from more strategic innovation. Eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks unlocks a more efficient workforce with the time, energy and creativity to innovate in meaningful ways. Internal systems need to facilitate collaboration and ensure that workflows are transparent. 
• Product: Data from Deloitte uncovered that 74% of AI adopters agree it will be integrated into all enterprise applications within three years. A commitment to infusing AI into all product ideation, development, and delivery needs will be critical as businesses continue to address ongoing shifts to the market. Product functionality needs to go beyond what’s being demanded now and recognize, anticipate and predict what is required in the future. 
• Process: A well-defined set of processes leads to a well-executed strategy. Without organization-wide workflows that enable operational efficiency, strategies remain static on paper. Analyzing existing processes and workflows, then identifying opportunities to improve with orchestration, integration, and automation lets businesses move from creative ideation to innovative, competitive, and differentiated products and solutions. 

We’re all facing both unique AND common challenges today, but with the right formula and strategy, every large organization can achieve their goals and plan for the future. The Autonomous Digital Enterprise framework helps business leaders think critically through different areas of the organization to spur the necessary reinvention. With change comes opportunity and the companies that can identify and act on the opportunities quickly will see the benefits today and in the future.