Today every part of the business is subject to new expectations, competitors, channels, threats, and opportunities. Every business has the potential to be a digital business.

Businesses that digitally transform will be able to connect more closely with customers, speed up the pace of innovation and, as a result, claim a greater share of profit in their sectors. Today digitally transformed companies have an edge; tomorrow, only digital businesses will succeed.

Here is my version of A-Z of Digital Transformation.

Artificial Intelligence: AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. BMW, Tesla, Google are using AI for self-driving cars. AI should be used to solve real-world tough problems like climate modeling to disease analysis and betterment of humanity

Big Data: This serves as a foundational backbone for digital transformation. Hyper-personalization and real-time recommendations based on the geo-location of the customers will be the key to success. Big Data Analytics is a driving force for action.

Customer Centricity: The most important theme of digital transformation is it should be customer focused with a consistent, enjoyable and very personal experience to customers.

Disruption: Digital has disrupted many businesses so far who did not take it seriously like Blockbuster, Kodak, Borders and brought new leaders on the horizon like Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, Spotify.

Employee-driven: Digital Transformation will be successful only when employees are involved, educated and empowered to enhance the customer experience.

Fail Fast: Digital is all about deploying quick PoCs and check the outcome. If it does not work then drop the concept/idea and move on to a new one. Be prepared to change the pace or direction as necessary.

Growth Hacking: Focuses on building products that fit the market needs, with a viral push to market with a very simple idea & all the digital tools like email, tweets, blogs. Zynga used FB alerts and online adverts while DropBox offered extra storage space for referring friends for growth.

Hyper-personalization: Use of browsing histories, past purchases, social media data, and internal customer data to provide more personalized and targeted products, services, and content. It is about being relevant at the right place and the right time to the right person.

Internet of things: All the businesses are aiming at reaching their Customers anywhere, anytime, any platform with any device.  All such smart devices or physical objects that are connected to the internet, are continuously emitting data and communicating with each other. IoT-based real-time predictive maintenance in manufacturing is becoming important to save costs and downtime.

Journey Maps: Creating customer journey maps is the prime and initial milestone for digital transformation where you understand the pitfalls and pain points with every touch point you have with customers. Once they are in place then plan with most impacting problems.

KNN: K nearest neighbor algorithm in Machine Learning used for classification problems based on distance or similarity between data points.

Leadership Support: Without actual drive from CEO and Board members, digital will not move further as it involves cultural business transformation.

Mobile First: Today we live in “always on, always connected” world, and use mobile for almost everything. We spend more time on mobile than any other digital channel. Start your digital implementation with mobile first in mind. More than half of the world population is on mobile now and

NFC: Near Field Communication used for a contactless, WiFi-style technology that could already be in your smartphone. A few years from now your credit cards, bus pass, train tickets, loyalty cards for high street coffee shops will be gone due to digital transformation and you only carry your phone.

Omni-Channel: It is about true continuity of customer’s experience even when they flip channels to complete a single transaction. Disney, Virgin Atlantic, Starbucks are great examples of Omni-Channel digital transformation.

Prioritize: Spend where you’ll make the biggest difference for the business. Small and quick successes will be drivers for digital transformation.

Quality: Quality of data collected by all the channels is extremely important in digital transformation for generating meaningful insights. Garbage in, Garbage Out still remains valid in the digital age.

Robotics: Robots are machines with programmed movements that allow them to move in certain directions or sequences. Artificial intelligence has given robots more ability to process information and to learn.

Sentiment Analytics: Sentiment analysis is all about helping companies gain better insights into their customers, and helping them to bridge the gap between insight and action by analyzing positive and negative sentiments.

Talent: To deliver on the digital transformation, organization have to get the right talent. As Jim Collins said in his book “Good to Great”, get the right people on the bus put them in right sits and then decide where the bus will go.

User Experience: This is extremely important considering the focus on the customer. Use of responsive web designs to adjust to any screen sizes with ease, make the website accessible on any platform, intuitive and pleasant to use is the key.

Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality is making a lot of impact on the world we live in today. Everything that we know about our reality comes by way of our 5 senses – Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch & Taste. Today Real Estate, Travel companies are coming up with VR gadgets to give the feel of virtual walks of houses or destinations like Eiffel tower / or Grand Canyon experience on your living room couch.

Wearables: They come in various forms, like smart watches, health trackers, Google Glass, interactive clothing, gesture controllers and the list goes on. Sooner or later, all of us are identified by the data we generate, and wearables represent a quantum leap in the type and quantity of data collected — which is both an interesting and a scary proposition

Xamarin: A modern programming language for iOS, Android & Windows mobile platforms.

Yarn: The earlier map-reduce has undergone a complete overhaul and now called yarn that allows multiple data processing engines such as interactive SQL, real-time streaming, data science and batch processing to handle data stored in a single platform.

ZooKeeper: ZooKeeper is a Hadoop centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.

Digital Transformation brings changes in product creation and delivery, changes in IT infrastructure, changes in the consumption and payment methods to ‘go digital’.