Digital Transformation Challenges

- Overview

Following are the main challenges stopping digital transformation from taking off in full swing. Fortunately, these challenges were exactly what software engineering was designed for. 

• Time to Market: The 21st century is a dog-eat-dog world. Companies will do anything to stay ahead of the competition. What this does is enable customers to expect new innovations to be available as soon as possible. The same goes for new features for existing products. This challenge of increasingly reduced time-to-market keeps companies on their toes. 
• Flexibility: Let’s assume that a company manages to adhere consistently to the strict time-to-market pressures, it still has to plan for changing customer needs. The competition pounces on any opportunity that it sees. Therefore, companies have to produce flexible and agile product models that can take up new functionality or they may fall behind the competition. 
• New Technologies: In a world where new devices and technologies are launched regularly, software developers and companies have to prepare for relatively new concepts to stay competitive in the market. 
• Technology Heterogeneity: With the rapid supply of new technologies come heterogeneous devices. Companies have to standardize the interfaces between completely different technologies. 
• Customer-Orientation: Since the advent of smartphones, software development has shifted most of its focus from functionality to customer experience. This forces companies to keep user-interface in mind at all times when developing consumer applications.