The Holy Trinity: Three trends that will take organizations to the next level in 2023 

The organizations of today are facing one crisis after another. Whether it’s geopolitical tension or rising inflation, they are being forced to adapt. Faced with squeezed budgets and dwindling resources, these macroeconomic headwinds are causing business leaders to make smarter investments than ever before.

This is causing many enterprises to reassess their strategies and invest more resources in digital transformation, as they seek the ability to do more with less. As this continues to gather pace, we’ll see three key trends emerging, to form a holy trinity of success that will define digital transformation in 2023.

1.      Answering prayers for improved experiences

Faced with a need to increase revenue in the midst of a mass skills shortage, it will be imperative for organizations to focus on improving both the customer (CX) and the employee experience (EX) in 2023. That’s because both customer and employee happiness are the key to business success, helping to maintain their loyalty.

Since the customer and employee journey often intersect, a failure to improve both will hinder efforts to optimise experiences and lead to heightened dissatisfaction. However, it’s become a struggle to improve both, as too often, experiences are developed independently of each other. As a result, employee and customer data remains segregated in silos, which creates inefficiencies that lead to frustration on both sides.

To overcome this in the year ahead, organizations will increasingly turn to a Total Experience (TX) strategy, where CX and EX are united. This will see them working to integrate customer and employee data seamlessly, and develop multi-experience applications that support both journeys. The result will be seamless experiences that lead to improved loyalty, increased revenue, and a more motivated workforce. Gartner says those that adopt a TX strategy will outperform their rivals by a quarter, when it comes to customer and employee satisfaction.

Whilst embracing a TX strategy will undoubtedly lay some of the foundations for a successful digital transformation, organizations will also need to relieve the burden on the IT teams responsible for delivering those experiences, as a major skills gap remains.

2.      The angel of automation

With recent research showing that 73 percent of IT leaders say it’s become harder than ever to hire the talent they need, organizations will increasingly turn to technology to bridge the gap. In particular, 2023 will see heavy investment in automation, with 80 percent of organizations revealing that hyperautomation is on their roadmap for the next two years.

But businesses must make sure they take the right approach to automation to ensure they reap the greatest reward. Instead of creating brittle automations that only support isolated use cases, organizations can achieve more if they work towards enterprise-wide contextual automation. This enables them to automate processes in a way that’s driven by the preferences of end-users, so their needs can be met more effectively. To enable this, organizations first need to focus on extracting data from silos to create feedback loops and data-driven insight that can make automation intuitive.

 With this more effective approach to automation, IT teams are able to focus their efforts on areas where they can deliver greater value, such as improving security and increasing the scale of the organization’s operations. This ultimately leads to greater success, as the organization can enjoy reduced costs, improved productivity, and faster growth.

3.      Embracing the spirit of innovation

 Automation is just one of the strategies organizations will use next year to alleviate the pressure on developers and IT staff. The widening skills gap, coupled with an increasing volume of work, means that IT departments are often a bottleneck to the organization’s ability to innovate. To alleviate this, IT leaders will increasingly look to empower the wider workforce to drive its own innovation.

In 2023, we will therefore see a rising number of organizations deploying no-code tools, as they seek to enable business technologists – employees that sit outside the IT department -- to create their own digital services, without needing to write a single line of code. With the use of simple drag and drop capabilities, non-technical workers will be able to bypass the IT bottleneck, to develop applications that improve both the customer and employee experience and build their own automations.

 This is a win-win for organizations, enabling them to tap into a pool of latent skills to accelerate innovation. Low/no-code tools will also reduce the cost of innovation through greater reuse of existing capabilities, and mean teams spend less time waiting for IT to deliver projects. This is the perfect example of how organizations can be empowered to do more with less, as it frees up the IT department to focus on the tasks that require their specific expertise.

 The holy trinity

 To make the most of these three trends, organizations will be increasingly drawn towards a composable business strategy powered by APIs. This sees them using APIs to expose their existing digital capabilities as a set of reusable building blocks. These blocks can then enable teams across the organization to access the data they need, unify it for use within contextual automation or TX platforms, and create new digital experiences through low/no-code tools.

It’s only with a composable business strategy that organizations will be able to take full advantage of the potential TX, contextual automation, and low/no-code tools have to offer. The reward will be faster innovation, improved experiences, greater revenue, and increased efficiencies. These trends powered by enterprise composability, will be the holy trinity for those needing to more with less, as they aim to navigate this economic turmoil in 2023.

Image credit: ikinciadres/depositphotos.com

Jeroen Reizevoort is Field CTO EMEA at MuleSoft.