2020 is the year of business growth. After having constantly struggled with raising funds, managing your business bootstrapped, attending innumerable networking meetups, working extra hours on coding your product, brainstorming ideas for pitching and marketing your idea to consumers and investors and most importantly, compromising on your health big time, it’s time to rise above everything and make this year yours.
Yes, we’re not kidding. Now that all your efforts are shaping up just the way you wanted, it’s time to further stabilize your business into a venture that can self-sustaining, solve concerns autonomously, have an amazing tech infrastructure and solve real problems in the real world.
For those of you who don't know, over 22.5% of startups established fail within one year of operations. If you’ve been running your business for over a year now, understand that you are among the 582 million entrepreneurs in this world who’s hustling day in and day out to make it work.
This post is dedicated to all your struggles and is focussed on taking your company towards the next big milestone. Here, we list out the major IT implementations your company should consider in 2020 because these are no longer ancillaries but essentials your business needs to sustain and grow in the coming years.
1. Cloud
Cloud is not just the future, it’s the present too. If you’re still waiting as a businessman for the future in tech, it’s time to wake up. Today, consumers and enterprises no longer need software applications or service platforms to be physically present in their systems. Instead, the rent their essentials out on cloud allowing them to save a ton on expenses.
If you didn’t know, over 90% of the businesses are on the cloud and it is estimated that by 2021, over 94% of the workloads will be processed by cloud data centers. Apart from allowing you to access and retrieve files from anywhere, taking your business to the cloud allows you to be flexible in terms of scalability as well. You can expand and downsize anytime you want according to your growth visions.
Without the cloud, you would end up paying tons of hardware and spend more time on offline collaboration, hampering your deadlines and productivity. Cloud also offers you optimum security by protecting your data regardless of your medium of access. For instance, even if you’ve lost your laptop on your airport transit, you can still get access to your priceless data on the cloud.
2. DevOps
If your business is not agile, it’s not competitive enough. From being a buzzword to becoming one of the most fundamental tools for business growth, DevOps has redefined software development and operations in business.
The greatest advantage of DevOps is that it streamlines your development process in such a way that it is not just efficient but dynamic as well. It ensures there are very fewer iterations in the development process with implementations of optimized automation and testing processes. With a continuous integration and continuous delivery modus operandi, DevOps ensures your deadlines and milestones are met on time and with minimal errors.
Any DevOps consultant would share that without DevOps implementation, probably each and every one of your team members will have a distinct understanding of the goal and workflow. DevOps brings together everyone on the same page so the goals are met seamlessly. Besides, it also paves the way for enhanced stability and synchronicity among teams and members.
3. Enterprise Mobility
You cannot achieve this year’s goals of growth if your workforce is not taken care of enough. For that, you need to bring in a new concept in your operations called enterprise mobility. What sounds like a jargon is relatively a simple concept. Enterprise mobility allows your company to go mobile in terms of your workplace.
This means your team members can work from anywhere and get your job done. This involves utilizing cloud technology, personal laptops and internet connections to work from anywhere on your project. To put in perspective why this is crucial, understand that over $87bn was lost because of traffic congestions. To break it down even further, an average American spends around 152 hours or 19 working days in traffic.
If you could imagine the productivity lost from one employee and then doing the math for others, you would realize that enterprise mobility enhances productivity, efficiency and boosts employee morale as well. An enterprise mobility development company would give you more insights on who you can go about implementing it.
4. Agile Project Management System
Projects with agile project management systems implemented are 28% more successful than their conventional counterparts. Ask any project manager and they would share that a project without an agile framework is bound to fail or incur harsh consequences in terms of quality and delivery.
In simple words, an agile framework allows you to collaborate better with your team members on the project you’re working on. Instead of developing your product as one whole unit and wasting time on fixing issues and bugs at the last moment, the agile model refines the goal into fragments of tasks called sprints. With this, you review the progress of your development every week and take corrective measures as and when required. You get to see the bigger picture every week and understand how the final product is taking shape.
If you don’t follow an agile framework, you would face hurdles like poor quality, increased risk of failure, lack of predictability of project outcomes and lesser operational transparency. Rings a bell?
5. ERP
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. Over the years, ERP implementations have been mostly restricted to bigger companies because of their affordability. However, smaller and medium-sized companies have also started understanding the potential of ERP.
That’s why it makes sense to read that over 95% of businesses that implemented ERP have experienced substantial improvements in their processes. Besides, 66% of the companies with ERP implemented have also experienced operational disruptions.
This means that ERP is an investment that offers innumerable returns. Apart from allowing your business to streamline processes across branches, departments and modules, ERP also gives you competitive edge such as:
- Data security
- Optimized collaboration thanks to centralized data
- Flexibility or enterprise mobility
- Forecasts financials and workloads
- Scalability
- Seamless reporting and more
6. Mobile App
Mobile-first has become the mantra for several companies out there. Having understood the flourishing power of the on-demand economy, businesses are implementing mobile-first strategies more than ever.
For the uninitiated, launching a mobile app for your business will allow to reach out to your customers faster. Considering that the number of people who access the internet from their smartphones or other devices has increased, mobile apps are one of the first concepts you need to implement for your business. By having an app, you get to engage better, interact more seamlessly and achieve better the vision you had for your business.
7. Digital Governance
As business owners, we all have a responsibility to be sensible with our products and our brand image. However, in the hustle, sometimes it is taken for a toss. While sometimes it sends out inconsistent messaging about our brand, it ends up hampering customer experiences the other times. That’s where digital governance comes in. Because there are multiple teams maintain different aspects of a business’s online image, the structured framework defines the rules, responsibilities, accountability and authorities for a brand’s online image.
With digital governance in place, you pave the way for a consistent brand image across your company’s website, social media handles, forums, advertisements and commercials, blogs and other channels you’re on. For this, you will have to revisit your content marketing strategies and content in general that have been defining your brand in diverse ways so far.
8. Machine Learning
A lot has been said about machine learning over the years. However, a lot of companies are yet to implement machine learning strategies into businesses. Whenever there’s a discussion about machine learning implementation, it’s mostly restricted to its impact on the product being developed.
But machine learning can be implemented into your operational systems as well. You can avoid hampered productivity by identifying redundant tasks and then replacing them with machine learning algorithms for automation. You can also fix gender-based wage gaps and forecast absenteeism and attrition with machine learning implementation. This not just elevates productivity but also fosters a healthy work culture, where people would love to be associated for the longest time.
9. Brilliant Offshore Vendors
As a business owner, you are supposed to spend most of your time on concerns and things that matter. Micromanagement is not part of your job profile. That’s why in 2020, it would be best to outsource your work to brilliant offshore vendors. With outsourcing, you get assured quality and compliance, stringent implementation of guidelines and meeting deadlines, transparent workflows and progress reports, better communication, extended support and savings on capital and labor costs. For instance, a web development company in USA can handle all your development needs and they might have already agile frameworks or enterprise mobility for enhanced outputs.
Though you need to consider a lot of factors to get the highest possible output for your investment, there are solid vendors who have been specializing in handling outsourced projects for decades.
10. Blockchain
Blockchain is again like the concept of machine learning. A lot of people talk about it but only a few actually implement it. While blockchain is still associated with concepts that still bewilder people like bitcoins or cryptocurrencies, blockchain offers tons of operational and functional advantages when implemented.
Firstly, blockchain technology is superiorly safe and secured that drastically reduces threats posed by hackers and intruders. Besides, it also eliminates the presence of intermediaries in transactions, allowing end-to-end encryption and interaction in payments. Further, it eliminates risks of frauds and paves the way for automatic reconciliation of transactions.
Regardless of your niche, you could implement blockchain app development into your business. All you need is expert guidance on this by veteran companies who have been doing this for years.
Speaking of veteran companies, all these might sound daunting for most starters. With the year just started and you still figuring out the way forward for your business, these might sound a little overwhelming as well.
That’s why you need veterans like us at X-Byte Enterprise Solutions to give you comprehensive insights on how you can go about implementing most of them. We’re not just a PHP development company. We are service providers of most of these IT implementations and as a team, we would be working for your growth this year.
Get in Touch with us today to get started any of these implementations.