Digital Transformation: The Imperative Need

Digital Transformation: The Imperative Need

Family Businesses in the MENA region and UAE have been discussing the changing business environment and how it is impacting the business. This has become a great matter of concern for the Family Businesses as the business industry is adapting to new and digitized ways of improving their business to be in the race. While if we talk about the FBs, the vast majority of them are confronting the troublesome development designs because of the long-held values and practices. The Family Business realize the need for coping up with the pace and upgrading the business according to the existing requirements of the dynamic business environment as discussed in The Tharawat Family Business Summit 2018¹.

What Family Businesses in the MENA region and UAE have:

1. Industrial Digitization is being actively embraced and practiced by Family Businesses in MENA locale. Digitization is helping the businesses to facilitate their everyday work and make working increasingly successful by going almost paperless and presenting the numerous of e-practices and mechanized methods in the company. This technical advancement ensures the stepwise completion of the task as the records are simultaneously maintained; access to which is also easy.

2. Innovation is the essence of any business. It gives an edge to business compared to the rest of the industry. It has been recorded that Family Businesses are innovative and they innovate more frequently as compared to other businesses because of close relations communicating trust between the elder (owner) and the more youthful, innovatively progressed and well-learned age of the family.

Digital Transformation

Being specialized in the two, Family Businesses needs to combine them to bring a digital transformation in the business. Digital Transformation would help the family business to use the digitized practices in an innovative way that makes the business stand out of the rest. Introducing transformation to the business which is inimitable and unachievable for the other business firm, is the kind of advantage gained by Digital Transformation. Along with this, the business activities become more effective and efficient.

What Family Businesses in the MENA region and UAE need to specialize in: Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

1. Business Intelligence is more of a first step for companies to take when they need the ability to make data-driven decisions. It is the continuous information accumulation process about each business-related perspective so that basic leadership is improved by better decision making. The data collection is done in a very structured and organized manner as it lays the basis for making critical choices.

2. Business Analytics, on the other hand, is the examination of the responses provided by Business Intelligence. While Business Intelligence describes the occurrence of an event, Business Analytics defines the reasons for occurrence of the event and its chances to reoccur in the future. Business Analytics, includes statistical and quantitative analysis, data mining, predictive modeling and so on.

Big Data Analysis

Business Analytics and Business Intelligence, when they come together, it leads to analyzing day to day business activities. Business intelligence hence gathers the useful information in a structured form which is further analyzed precisely by the analyst to formulate, structure and restructure the business-related activities, procedures and models to make them more effective and efficient. Big-Data analysis enables the regular up-gradation of the systems and the business becomes advanced as it can transform the large and diverse data (in any form: structured, semi and unstructured) into useful information. The benefits of Big Data can help the family businesses in the UAE and MENA region to flourish across the globe and still accumulate the information from worldwide and conceptualize that information into dynamic business patterns.

Combining what you HAVE with what you WANT to achieve What you AIM

"See Fig.1 below"

After knowing about the relevance of terms mentioned in fig.1, it is likewise critical to comprehend, that in what manner can all these work together. The process of gathering information i.e. Business Intelligence can be done digitally through reporting, automated monitoring and alerting, dashboards, scorecards, and ad hoc query. The collected data is further statistically analyzed by the business analysts and according to the identified situations the scope of growth, expansion and development can be marked, be it departmentally, regionally or globally; in case of any strategic, functional or technical failure observed during the process of business analysis, the required alterations can also be made. The analysis of business related aspects and business environment give an opportunity to bring changes or altogether introduce a new element in the business, giving rise to Innovation. Innovation is not just an idea which is implemented, but as we know, it needs a great deal of groundwork, examinations and preliminaries before usage and furthermore after that. Therefore every fact and figure related to the business could be closely monitored and this huge data is managed by big data analysis to guard the business actions. This entire process of collecting and analyzing the huge data through digital mediums leads to a digitally transformed Business unit.

Family Businesses are already half way or more in transforming their businesses digitally as many of the above-stated terms are put to practice in the UAE and MENA region. The firms need to work on this transformation in detail to make it complete and benefit their organizations.

Sources:

https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/local/mena-family-businesses-discuss-impact-of-digitisation