The role of digital has become so important that it is risky to completely delegate your digital strategy to your CDO/CTO without having even a modest understanding of important digital trends.
To this end, we invite you to (re)discover five digital concepts that every manager should be familiar with. We focused on topics that could impact critical activities for your business, namely :
- Acquiring new customers
- Data security and reputation
- User Experience (customer or employee)
- The organization of work
Here is a quick and necessarily incomplete overview, Growth Hacking, SIEM, API Management and RPA. Some acronyms may seem a bit boring, but they can have a huge impact on your business.
1) Growth Hacking:
Definition : Growth hacking refers to a set of techniques to better execute your growth strategy. Some consider growth hacking to be a mindset. Growth hacking applies to a variety of processes.
- Target research (identification of the most relevant databases)
- Data scraping (extraction of customer data)
- Personalizing the approach (building targeted campaigns)
- Initiating contact (advertising, landing pages, content marketing, cold emails)
- Measuring engagement
- Closing (contract, creation of a user profile, subscription)
Growth hacking is widely used by fast-growing startups and is presented as one of the reasons for their success.
Why bother ? Growth hacking enables better performance in your business and, above all, better management. It allows you to test new ways of prospecting by measuring customer engagement. Growth hacking is even more interesting when you involve product and marketing teams in the process. It allows you to measure public reception of a potential new product even before its development… which revolutionizes the product lifecycle.
Tools : It really depends on the company’s business, but we’ll mention the B2B must-haves: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Lemlist (cold emailing), Dropcontact (scraping).
For B2C, using a landing page seems essential; Junto or Wix do the job.
2) SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) :
Definition : SIEM is a combination of tools and processes that help identify abnormal events within your IT infrastructure. To achieve this, SIEM tools continuously track the activity of your IT infrastructure (“its logs”). When logs deviate from the norm, SIEM detects and reports them.
Why bother ? SIEM is a critical component of your cybersecurity strategy. It’s one of the ways to detect if you’re being targeted by an attack. With a 99% probability that your company will eventually be targeted by an attack, it’s essential to implement a SIEM (among other things) to respond quickly and identify the threat.
Tools : It’s likely that your company already has a SIEM. This type of system is fairly common; if you don’t have one even though you have a dedicated CISO, you should start asking questions. The SIEM market is quite mature, and you can find many providers to equip you. The difference between SIEM tools comes from two main criteria: the ability of your tool to “self-learn” in order to become more sophisticated in anomaly detection and the automation of the tool in order to free up management time for your team. Some examples of providers: Splunk, Tehtris, Rapid7, Logpoint.
3) API Management :
Definition : API management is the discipline that manages a company’s APIs. APIs are the interfaces that facilitate application integration and development. APIs allow your applications to communicate with each other; they act as a gateway between your different software programs. For example, an API is used to record an order in your billing software when a product is purchased on your website.
Why bother ? It is important to care about API management because it is what allows you to orchestrate the different applications of your information system. Good orchestration can have very beneficial effects because your entire information system will function well. It can also bring you business, for example, the bank ING Direct developed and then proposed a payment API allowing merchants to invoice their customers via SMS or Email. The API links different IT systems (that of the Bank, the Customer, the Merchant) and allows merchants to save considerable time. The API is an extraordinary way to improve the user experience. API Management can allow you to offer your customers and employees “Friction-Free customer journeys” (seamless customer journeys).
Tools : There are many tools available on the market. The best known are Apigee, Mulesoft, Axway, Software AG, and SmartBear. If you’re already in the cloud or considering moving there, you can also look into native solutions offered by cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure API Management or Amazon API Gateway.
4) RPA : Robotic Process Management :
Definition : RPA is an advanced form of business process digitization. It comes after digitalization. It involves automating a process, or part of it, by integrating artificial intelligence (e.g., a bot) that performs actions without human intervention.
Why bother ? RPA increases your productivity by freeing your employees from performing time-consuming, low-value tasks. However, RPA is only effective for very simple processes that are not designed to scale. It cannot work on complex or random processes.
Tools : The leading vendors in the market are UiPath, BluePrism, AutomationAnywhere, Nice, Pegasystems, HelpSystems.
