What is Digital Transformation? We Asked 12 Industry Experts

Digital transformation. It’s possibly the most-talked about industry term of 2017. But what does “digital transformation” actually mean? How has it evolved unified communications and collaboration (UCC) technologies? What’s its impact on your customer experience? And how exactly is it “giving machines a voice” through the Internet of Things (IoT)?We asked 12 industry experts what digital transformation means to them and found four common themes that can help your business understand exactly what digital transformation means to you.Check out the video below for the top four benefits of digital transformation in the words of the experts themselves.

From the Video

What is Digital Transformation? We asked 12 industry experts.

1. Increasing Productivity & Streamlining Applications

The changes going on today are absolutely amazing. Communications and collaboration, the way they're being tied in with work flow and changing the way people work. It's not just a silo anymore. Communication and collaboration is a part of what we do every day. It's helping us be so much more productive than ever before.
- Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion

Digital transformation is going to be putting together multiple modes of communications: voice, messaging, mobility, collaboration, in a unified solution that users have access to all of those modes of communication. As they become more used to those, they'll be more convenient, more efficient for them, more effective communication amongst themselves.
- Byron W. Battles, Principal, Technology Trends Group

Digital transformation means a lot of things for us, but I think number one, is the integration and the capabilities of technologies that used to be thought of as disparate coming together. The Internet of Things, voice and channel communications, as well as disparate applications and databases, working as one solution for a single result.
- Lou Gallagher, Senior Director of Engineering & Architecture, HealthEast

Digital transformation means, to me, the opportunity to take technology that exists today, but also technology that's coming in to our markets and using it change the way people do business. You know, this is a great opportunity to increase productivity, but also take what was done by human hands and moving that into the digital world or machine world, if you will. You can use those now, those employees that have been freed up to do other things and they can also grow within the organization.
- Ryan Smith, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Mitel

2. Building Better Outcomes

Digital transformation is really about businesses using technology to change their business. It's changing fundamental parameters like revenue, cost, and it's looking at how a business is built up and then rebuilding it essentially for better outcomes.
- Jim Davies, CTO Enterprise Solutions, Mitel

I work in the public safety industry and digital transformation really is the opportunity to transform how public safety communicates and being able to move away from strictly voice only communications through a radio and being able to incorporate advanced technologies to improve public safety outcomes whether that be through sharing of information and intelligence sources to apprehend bad guys quicker, or wearables to keep first responders safer as they're going in to danger and harm's way. I think that digital transformation really has the ability to enable a whole new way for public safety to operate.
- Niki Papazoglakis, Program Coordinator, Harris County CTS

3. Leveraging Data & Intelligent Measurement

Digital transformation is the intersection of IoT, Big Data, and analytics. It gives us the opportunity to measure things that we've never measured before so we can do intelligent things with that information and then be able to make sure, as individuals, we can respond to the right high-priority events when possible.
- Josh Haslett, VP Systems Engineering, Mitel

I think digital transformation represents a tremendous opportunity to our customers and partners. It really represents the next phase of data collection, of activity within an enterprise. Those companies that take those data points and quickly translate it to information where decisions can be made quickly and effectively are gonna be the winners.
- Todd Abbott, EVP Global Sales, Mitel

4. Redesigning the Customer Experience

For me, digital transformation is really about reshaping your business based on your customer's needs. There's various different touch points, ways in which your customers interact with business. It's really looking at the ways at which you can optimize that but through the lens of the customer.
- Tim Banting, Principal Analyst, GlobalData PLC

Digital transformation, to me, means bringing customers closer to their providers and providers closer to their customers to give their customers a better experience and, obviously, to develop more business.
- Jay Lassman, Professional Services Practice Leader, IntelliCom Analytics

You know, today's announcements around digital transformation really provide our customers with a path so they can start with what they've got, move at their pace, and really start to take advantage of all these new IoT devices, sensors, elements that they can use to really take the machines give them a voice to interact with humans. What does that ultimately deliver? It delivers better customer experience, faster response times, and it actually can save them money as well.
- Wes Durow, CMO, Mitel

Well digital transformation, by definition, is where you connect people, things, and information. Connecting those things, that's the digital part. The transformation is how you use those things that you're connecting to transform your business, the transformation piece. This is a time in the market where I don't care what business you are, everyone's under pressures to grow their business, and to do it with less cost. They have different things, process improvement, and things that they're calling digital transformation but in reality, the enabling element is this connecting people, things, and information. That's one of the things that Mitel does really well. Our platforms are architected to make this happen, so we're really excited about how digital transformation is really just starting but we're extremely well positioned for it.
- Rich McBee, CEO, Mitel