10 Digital Transformation Benefits for Businesses

The events of 2020 showed the criticality of digital transformation. Organizations that had fully embraced digital transformation benefits in preceding years were in position to make rapid adjustments, relying on their cloud architecture, modern security protocols, an agile company culture and their full range of business-enabling technologies to support vast new work-from-home environments, as well as newly virtualized business transactions and interactions. But companies, nonprofits and governmental entities lagging in their digital initiatives struggled to adjust to the year's rapidly changing economic and social environment. "It woke up a lot of C-suite officers, alerting them to stop dragging their feet on their digital transformation efforts, because they saw that the companies that were more mature in their digital transformation suffered much less disruption and much less costly disruption in that environment," said Rick Pastore, senior research director and IT advisor at the consultancy The Hackett Group. According to a mid-2020 Gartner survey, more than two-thirds of boards of directors accelerated their digital business initiatives in the wake of the COVID-19 disruption and about half foresee changing their organizations' business model as a result of the pandemic. Digital transformation requires the infusion of internet-based tools and technologies into a company's processes, so that the organization can meet and actually anticipate the wants and needs of its stakeholders.