Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 17 | Page 44

CIO OPINION CIO opinion CIO OPINION “ WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY WHERE THE EXPECTATION IS DIGITAL AND THERE’S NO GETTING AWAY FROM IT. ////////////////// Juane Peacock, Managing Director: Coastal Region and Enterprise Information Management at Datacentrix Digitalisation: The unavoidable key to unlocking future opportunities With local businesses facing a ‘perfect storm’ of data sources, manipulations and stores, Juane Peacock, Managing Director: Coastal Region and Enterprise Information Management at Datacentrix, says there is a growing imperative to act now. T he combined forces of the Internet of Things (IoT), which brings vast and untapped data sources, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine-to- machine learning, requiring new disciplines in terms of process and governance and blockchains, where perhaps all our asset registers will be stored, mean that organisations must consider how their businesses will be affected. Not only will these new drivers bring unforeseen opportunities, they will also lead to different competitors and companies must adapt their existing business structures to be truly transformative. for tomorrow’s onslaught of new forces. In the local context this is perhaps even more pertinent. South African businesses are today no longer just competing at a local level. The pressure is on to ensure that they are ‘fit’ from a global perspective as market forces and customer expectations mean that best products, best services and best prices are available to all. The digitisation process effectively enables businesses to remove wasted time and cost and this in turn enables them to focus workforces on customer, service and productivity, the cornerstones of a globally competitive business. Digitalisation + EIM = Gold The digitalisation of the business’ existing data capture, management, work processes and insights (through analytics) is the building block necessary to ensure a business is prepared today 44 INTELLIGENTCIO Digitisation alone results in many provable business benefits, but a solid digitalisation campaign would go nowhere without the foundation on www.intelligentcio.com