A paradigm shift: Turbocharge productivity through Cloud (Guest blog from PwC)
Author: Senthil Murugan Arumugam, Senior Manager - Cloud and Data Transformation, PwC
In today’s business world, Cloud-led Digital Transformation has become key to achieve significant, sustainable growth. As a “Digital Core” that brings together multiple technologies, Cloud has rapidly enhanced digital and business transformation over the years. However, despite rapid growth, productivity has sharply declined across the UK and other OECD countries over the past decade.
A vast literature has documented the existence of positive relationship between Digital Transformation and industry-level productivity. There are multiple instances relying on exogenous drivers of Digital Transformation that allow firms to improve product design and production processes, automate mundane tasks, enable remote work, among other things.
Cloud-led Digital Transformation unlocks the “Productivity Potential”
Enterprises determined to grow rapidly must find ways for their workforce to achieve more and empower people to work faster rather than hiring more people. As a result, technology is altering its role from being a facilitator to being a core differentiator transforming every business a digital business. Here’s how companies can adopt Digital Transformation - facilitated by Cloud, to improve productivity, and supercharge the workplace:
1) Cloud fosters collaboration
Remote and distributed teams are the future of working, enabling companies to hire the best talent for highly skilled positions, irrespective of the location. As the trend of “Working from home (WFH)” continues and grows, the need for tools that can connect, communicate, and allow teams to collaborate in real-time becomes imperative.
Cloud-based solutions enhances collaboration across time zones and functional boundaries with a wide array of capabilities such as communication, information sharing and product delivery, to name a few. This cross-team transparency is paramount to unleashing the productivity of teams leading to high performance.
2) Data accessibility
With on-prem solutions, data is confined to silos and teams have little visibility into what other teams are doing. Cloud-led Digital Transformation enhances the ability of organisations to mine internal and external information, fostering their agility for forward-looking technologies, enhancing innovation.
Specifically, going cloud can assist businesses in improving their data analysis capacity, inducing business process improvements (BPI) leading to high productivity. Cloud empowers teams to access data from any device, anywhere and anytime, resulting in better outcomes for organisations. Funnelling data from multiple systems into a single source of truth to undertake actionable insights streamlines internal processes, drive better performance and productivity across the company.
3) Leverage Automation
Cloud offers a unique opportunity for businesses looking to streamline their operations. Utilising cloud-based tools and modern solutions such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), companies can automate daily mundane tasks, freeing their employees’ valuable time to focus on more strategic and productive tasks.
Combating burnout and improving work-life balance through automation are critical retention strategies in a shifting labour market. Automation combined with Cloud enables companies to optimise processes, develop complex workflows and deliver personalised engagement at scale, reaping significant savings and productivity benefits.
4) AI-driven decision-making
Artificial Intelligence and Cloud are the most important technologies transforming businesses across industries. There is no doubt that AI combined with Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning algorithms excels at processing and analysing large amounts of data quickly and accurately.
The integration of AI in a Cloud-led Digital Transformation(s) is poised to accelerate, offering companies advanced tools to analyse and interpret data efficiently. AI driven data analysis and data annotation are crucial in enhancing productivity by helping teams make more informed decisions across functional departments such as Product development, Marketing, Customer service and Operations.
Conclusion
The adoption of Cloud-led Digital Transformation can significantly enhance business productivity in various ways. By leveraging scalability, flexibility and accessibility companies can streamline their operations, improve collaboration, and maximise employee utilisation on strategic initiatives.
To find out more about how PwC can help with your Cloud-led Digital transformation, get in touch.