At what point is the digital transformation in companies? What services are the most demanded and why?

Right now we have several factors to measure where we are. These factors are measurable by the type of corporation we are talking about, depending on its size, the capabilities they have for investment in digital transformation are different and, many times, the lack of knowledge of the capabilities of that digital transformation can make you profitable. as a corporation and are not aware of and do not invest enough in technology.

That said, we have two clearly differentiated companies. The large, solid company, with a strong business, that periodically invests in digital transformation, in renewing its systems, always being up to date… And, on the other hand, we find ourselves with a company that, due to its size or lack of knowledge does not invest what it should on a regular basis in its transformation and technological improvement processes and often comes to us with the need to reinvent almost all its business processes to be in line with the market.

What role did technology play in business models 10 years ago and what is its role now? Has anything changed?

A system that is 10 years old is already obsolete and our way of thinking has evolved a lot in this time. Before, investing in technology was solving a specific problem. Now, technology has gone from being an expense to being a budget item for companies, in fact, in many of them it is the most important budget item there is.

We are managing to see this investment in technology as something profitable and productive. For example, 10 years ago you had a monitoring system that served to notify you that something had broken and now, with a monitoring screen, you can see that artificial intelligence mechanisms have been implemented that know how to predict that at that point there is going to be a incident and alerts, not only the IT team, but also the corporate applications team on which that system depends, the human resources associated with that business trunk that is going to be affected… and makes monitoring go from being reactive classic to a proactive.

What examples can you give us in which the digital transformation has allowed the optimization of business objectives?

Every digital transformation project meets some type of business objective, be it qualitative or quantitative. At Izertis we have a couple of cases of each type, for example, a client from the banking sector asked us for help to transform their corporate website from the personal area of ​​bank users to encourage cross-selling. We were analyzing the trends of users when they were on the website of their personal area to see where they clicked the most, how long they read and in what parts of the web page and what we proposed was a redesign of the web so that, in those fields where we had controlled that the user spent more time, other banking products appeared that could be contracted.

This has an immediate result of an investment in digital transformation that pays off with the bank generating new products for existing customers. But we have another success story of a national insurance company that told us that in order to operate in the insurance market at a national level, it needed to comply with an audit regarding its backup copies, its data protection. Izertis, together with manufacturers and suppliers, established a backup and data protection model where we located it in three independent points of the Spanish geography and we even saw part of the backup physically stored on one medium, which was manually transferred to another point of the Spanish geography for its protection.

Outside of Izertis there are examples of how this technological evolution is going to be brought to Europe as a success story, and it is that an Autonomous Community, by means of satellite photography, is controlling aid to the agricultural sector to see that what corresponds to each plot is grown and they have evolved it in such a way that not only is it controlled that the aids go where they belong, but based on those photographs and AI they help them to see how the crop field is and if it is the optimal time to plant, giving them a report to the farmer to plant what corresponds to him.

It quickly occurs to me that, in this consulting world, this is very easily evolving. For example, if I am going to tell you when you can plant, surely I will also be able to tell you when you have to pick it, at the optimal time. But it is not only that, it is that there are already machines that collect the fields automatically and I am convinced that in a few years we will be able to see how that satellite system that analyzes the photographs can send the machine to collect the entire crop field . It is the beauty and magic of digital transformation in any type of sector.

What is the main challenge you encounter when you accompany companies when it comes to making the leap towards a more digital model?

They can be summed up in three: The main surprise issue in corporations is the time factor, undertaking a transformation project depending on its magnitude can be a project of weeks or even months and not all corporations are willing to assume these deadlines.

Then there is the economic issue. Many times the ambition of corporations is very great, but the budget item does not match the balance.

And, lastly, but for me the most important since I started in this world, is the perception of the end user. When you invest in a digital transformation process, it will end up being used by someone (customers of the company, internal users…) and if we forget about this perception of the user and that the technological solution is friendly… I have seen how huge projects have been dropped because they have not managed to make the user enjoy it and be friendly.

If you had to choose three trends in the technology consulting sector of the present and the future, what would they be and why?

At Izertis, for some time now, I have been in charge of periodically carrying out a market study of what CEOs demand, of how the IT world is… to advise our commercial area and corporate level of what is the technological course that must be followed to be able to help corporations.

Today it can be summarized in three large blocks: First, security. All technological investment must be accompanied in parallel by a security point of view (industrial security, of users and confidential data, of systems…) This is key even in development. Today, the solutions that are developed to measure are made with a clear focus on protection.

Another great trend is the increase in hybrid ecosystems, understood as two large blocks. At the level of technological systems, the market is booming and there are so many solutions that you have to be accompanied by a technological partner that helps you to mold all of these into a client, we have providers in the cloud, tailor-made solutions via the web, solutions that are in house… and we have to know how to combine all these so that the result is correct. Within hybrid work we also find teleworking or remote work, which has clearly been established in 90-95% of corporations, but perhaps it has not been done correctly and now it is time for a second job, which is to review how this implementation was done and put a layer of security, monitoring, see that this environment is productive or that the users who use that teleworking platform comply with what they have to do.

Finally, also very booming, is the world of automation, which in the technological world, with AI, is evolving enormously. This is easy to sell within the corporation itself because the benefits we obtain with automation are related to the economic world (due to cost savings), but also to quality improvement, since automation is not wrong…

I believe that we will continue to see investment in all of these trends in the coming months.