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Business Forward reveals digital transformation’s sharper edge

We’re approaching the tipping point with digital transformation as more and more businesses accelerate from the planning to the doing stage.

Here in Melbourne at our Business Forward event we’re going to hear from a whole host of organisations that are now reaping the benefit of transformation. They are changing the relationship they have with customers – delivering more personalised but flexible services. They are rethinking business processes and strategy and providing employees with the sorts of powerful tools that keep them engaged and at their best. They are infusing intelligence into everything they do.

And they are getting a sharper edge; moving faster, planning better, responding rapidly and thanks to technologies that make the most of cloud and mobility they’re able to stay ahead of the pack.

Over the past few weeks we have announced a slew of new capabilities with our Spring ’18 release for Dynamics 365 and Business Application Platform. We’ll be providing more detail about that at Business Forward and also sharing details from our roadmap which is designed to help businesses continually improve and innovate on strong digital foundations.

Just recently we commissioned IDC to do some research for us. We wanted to understand what the impact of transformation could be.

They found that digital transformation will add an estimated $45 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2021 and increase its growth rate by 0.5 per cent annually.

Everyone likes to know what the dollar impact of their investment is. But there are other less tangible – but no less important benefits.

Customer satisfaction for one. Employee engagement another. Supply chain streamlining. Operational efficiencies. The list goes on.

But don’t just take my word for it. The great benefit of attending an event like Business Forward is that you get to hear from the people who are actually doing the digital transformation, deploying the technologies, engineering the business process change and nurturing new engaged corporate cultures that are constantly looking for a better way.

They are embracing cloud solutions, rolling out intelligence-infused business applications, exploring cognitive services, AI and machine learning, deploying internet of things solutions. Not just planning – doing.

Let’s just look at two organisations that are focussed on keeping Australians healthy – and how they are digitally transforming.

Bupa TeleHealth is deploying Dynamics 365 as a scalable, secure solution to provide 360-views of client information to allow it to provide tailored health recommendations and it’s also exploring how it could use chatbots, cognitive services and robotics in the future.

And Australia’s Department of Health is using Dynamics 365 to underpin secure case management solutions intended to optimise health outcomes while improving the Department’s workflow.

That’s just a snapshot of one sector – two very different organisations – but all sharing the single goal – to be better.

It’s the same in manufacturing as companies embrace the idea of Industry 4.0 and the Factory of the future; in retail where omni channel, streamlined services are the new normal; in education where technology is being deployed to maximise impact; in government where there’s clear appetite for better more efficient service delivery.

Business Forward is a very deliberately named event. It’s a real showcase of what forward-facing enterprises are doing, what technologies they are opting for, what strategic direction they are taking. After this year we may need to rename it Business Fast Forward.

Watch this space.