Top 7 digital transformation trends to drive efficient growth in 2023

A few years ago, the pandemic caused an urgent acceleration of digital transformation initiatives. It prompted companies (of all sizes) to invest in advanced technologies to survive in the new normal. Those investments weren’t just a few flashes on the radar, though. The resulting economic uncertainty, coupled with changing customer needs, has led companies to redouble their efforts – with a renewed focus on operational efficiency, productivity and resilience.

As this trend continues, Mulesoft, owned by Salesforce identified seven aspects of digital transformation that will be essential to overcome operational pressures and drive efficient and sustainable growth in 2023.

Automation for efficiency

While companies have already adopted automation, Mulesoft suggests investment in the technology will go beyond isolated instances by 2023. The goal is to help business leaders do more with less. This will ultimately help them drive efficient growth, increase productivity and generate cost savings amid business uncertainty caused by rising inflation, rising energy costs, growing labor shortages and geopolitical conflicts.

According to a Deloitte questionnaire, 53% of organizations have already started implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Meanwhile, Gartner predictions that hyper-automation will enable organizations to reduce operational costs by 30% by 2024. By 2025, the hyperautomation software market will reach nearly $860 billion.

“Everyone wants to automate the work they do; meanwhile, we are in an economic situation where companies must prioritize cost efficiency. Automation is about creating ways of working that can save time while continuing to drive efficient growth, simply doing more with less,” said Brent Hayward, CEO of MuleSoft.

Composability for agility

Flexibility is the need of the hour, but most enterprises fail to achieve it due to legacy technologies and data silos. According to Mulesoft, companies will address this problem in 2023 by adopting a composable enterprise strategy at scale. This allows teams to reuse their existing capabilities to adapt to changing market needs, helping them gain customer loyalty and growth in a cost-effective and strategic manner.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, 60% of mainstream organizations will see becoming a composable enterprise as a strategic goal, and those taking this approach will be ahead of their competition by 80% in the speed of deploying new features.

IT teams are under constant pressure to meet digital transformation needs. But the talent needed to drive these initiatives is more scarce than ever. This, Mulesoft suggested, will be solved in 2023 with the widespread adoption of low-code/no-code tooling.

With these tools, we will see more organizations create fusion teams that combine business and technology experts, able to accelerate transformation projects to meet tight deadlines. According to Gartner, IT departments that empower their business users in this way are 2.6 times more likely to accelerate their digital transformation projects.

Total experience (TX) for customer and agent support

Enterprises have long focused on improving customer experience (CX) to drive growth, secure revenue, and ensure loyalty. However, they have now come to realize that improving the employee experience (EX) is just as important to success.

As such, Mulesoft estimates that by 2023, an increasing number of leading organizations will look to total experience (TX) as a means of improving both customer and employee journeys, particularly in the areas where they intersect. This will create superior shared experiences and generate additional business value by reusing existing technology investments that are fundamental to key customer and employee experience initiatives.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use TX to transform their business models to achieve “world-class customer and employee engagement levels.” In addition, organizations that focus on total experience will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX by 2024.

Automated data intelligence

As organizations focus on being data-driven, most of the data assets needed to generate actionable information remain isolated and locked in different systems. In 2023, Mulesoft said, companies will address this problem with a modern composable approach to integration. This paves the way for creating a data fabric that connects data across platforms and between business users. By embedding real-time analytics into this data structure, organizations can automate decision making, dynamically improve data usage and reduce data management efforts by 70%.

More layered and integrated cyber defenses

According to Mulesoft, increasing investments in distributed architectures and edge technologies will lead to greater security risks in 2023. In response, the company said, organizations will adopt the cybersecurity mesh approach, where “a flexible, composable architecture integrates widely distributed and disparate security services” . .” Gartner says organizations adopting this architecture will reduce the financial impact of security incidents by an average of 90% by 2024. However, to succeed, they must manage connections, APIs, compositions, and automation bots from a single management interface.

>>Don’t miss our new special issue: Zero trust: the new security paradigm.<

Sustainability will be a focus

CXOs are very vocal about environmental sustainability, given the benefit to the planet and the potential to distinguish a company as a “green crusader.”

According to Mulesoft, by 2023, companies will look to drive sustainability in their operations by using a composable enterprise strategy to unlock and integrate data and applications, and applying automation and analytics to gain insights.

Currently, about 90% of technology leaders recognize sustainability as a key IT goal in their organization and expect budgets to increase by 10-20% over the next three years.