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AI Implementation in Healthcare to Enhance Patient Care and Data Management

AI Implementation in Healthcare has ushered in a transformative era, where the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not merely an innovation but a necessity to enhance patient care and optimize data management.

The healthcare and life sciences industry generates over 30% of all global data, and the challenge is to efficiently and securely harness this data to drive informed decision-making and streamline operations. Coretelligent stands at the forefront of facilitating healthcare businesses to navigate through this digital transformation, offering tailored “Healthcare AI Integration Solutions” and expertise in implementing robust AI platforms like Microsoft Azure.


AI Implementation in Healthcare

The Pinnacle of Data Management in Healthcare

The vast data generated by healthcare institutions, from electronic health records to imaging, often remains underutilized, with approximately 95% of data generated by hospitals going unused.

The integration of AI technologies, such as Microsoft Power, Fabric and Azure AI, presents a viable solution to this data underutilization, offering tools that consolidate, standardize, and make data accessible in a unified platform. Coretelligent’s approach to AI-Driven Data Management ensures that healthcare organizations, including medical facilities, can leverage these AI tools to their fullest potential, ensuring data is not just accumulated but also effectively utilized to enhance patient care and operational efficiency.

Enhancing Patient and Provider Experiences with AI

Microsoft’s Azure AI introduces tools like Azure AI Health Bot, Text Analytics for health, and Azure AI Health Insights, each designed to streamline patient-provider interactions, simplify clinical reports, and provide a consolidated view of a patient’s medical history using generative AI.

This tool is a wonder for healthcare professionals, aiding in managing clinical and administrative tasks while also enhancing patient interactions with personalized experiences. It’s a step towards individualized precision medicine, quicker research on critical diseases, and innovative patient care. The Health Bot also plays a pivotal role in making healthcare data more accessible and analytics-ready, facilitating the creation of insightful patient timelines for better care delivery. With the Health Bot, healthcare is not just a service, but an engaging, interactive experience, marking a promising stride towards a patient-centric approach.

AI Implementation in Healthcare: Real-World Impact

In an era where technology is the driving force behind evolution, healthcare is no exception. Microsoft’s Azure AI Health Bot is just one example of how cutting-edge technology can be harnessed to revolutionize healthcare delivery and patient engagement. The impact of this intelligent tool is multi-faceted and resonates through various layers of the healthcare ecosystem.

Forecasted & Current Benefits:

  1. Enhanced Patient Engagement: One of the hallmark features of the Azure AI Health Bot is its ability to foster enhanced patient engagement. By powering intuitive chatbot experiences, it provides patients with an interactive platform to seek information, schedule appointments, and have a personalized healthcare experience. This not only empowers patients with better control over their healthcare journey but also alleviates the administrative burden on healthcare providers that find themselves answering the same questions.
  2. Precision Medicine: The promise of individualized precision medicine is brought a step closer to reality with this technology. By facilitating the analysis of vast amounts of data and creating actionable patient timelines, the Health Bot enables healthcare professionals to devise personalized treatment plans. This tailored approach could augment the effectiveness of treatments and improves overall patient outcomes.
  3. Accelerated Research: The realm of medical research is often hampered by the bottleneck of data management and analysis. The Health Bot, with its data normalization and analytics readiness features, accelerates the pace at which critical research on life-threatening diseases can be conducted. This acceleration could potentially lead to quicker discoveries of treatments and cures.
  4. Optimized Administrative Workflows: The administrative workload in healthcare settings is often overwhelming. The Health Bot serves as a virtual co-pilot, managing administrative tasks and allowing healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care rather than paperwork. This optimization of workflows is crucial for reducing clinician burnout and enhancing the efficiency of healthcare delivery.
  5. Data Privacy and Compliance: With a feature like de-identification service, the Health Bot ensures that data privacy and compliance are upheld while still retaining the clinical relevance of the data. This is paramount in a domain where data privacy is non-negotiable.
  6. Global Health Equity: With multilingual support, the Health Bot transcends linguistic barriers, making healthcare information and services accessible to a broader spectrum of individuals regardless of language, contributing to global health equity.

AI Implementation in Healthcare serves as a bridge between healthcare providers and patients, facilitating a collaborative, informed, and personalized healthcare journey. Through such innovations, we are not just witnessing a transformation in healthcare delivery but a move towards a more patient-centric, accessible, and equitable healthcare system.

Recap: What AI Can do for you:

  • Clinical Assistance and Administrative Workloads Management: The Azure AI Health Bot is being expanded to allow healthcare organizations to build co-pilots for their healthcare professionals. This will help manage both administrative and clinical workloads, which in turn can enhance the patient experiences.
  • Specialized Chatbot Experiences: The Health Bot is designed to assist healthcare organizations in creating specialized chatbot experiences. These chatbots are now powered by generative AI, enabling high-value conversational scenarios specifically tailored for the health and life sciences industry. This could potentially facilitate better interaction between healthcare professionals and patients, or provide patients with an easily accessible source of information.
  • Actionable Insights for Patient Care: The Azure AI Health Bot, along with other tools, is portrayed as a part of a broader ecosystem that aims at making precision medicine more individualized, speeding up research for life-threatening diseases, and finding innovative ways to improve patient care.
  • Data Accessibility and Normalization: Before AI and machine learning can be effectively utilized, the data needs to be analytics-ready. This involves making healthcare data accessible and normalizing it for analytics and AI applications in the cloud. Although not directly mentioned, it’s implied that tools like the Azure AI Health Bot could play a part in this data preparation process by possibly extracting or processing data.
  • Enhanced Patient Engagement: Through examples, the article illustrates how a patient could interact with a chatbot (possibly powered by Azure AI Health Bot) on a hospital website to get answers about medications and set up appointments, highlighting an enhanced engagement experience.
  • Support for Healthcare Professionals: The health bot facilitates the creation of actionable, chronological patient timelines based on clinical data and evidence. This could be crucial in providing healthcare professionals with a clear and organized view of a patient’s medical history, aiding in better diagnosis and treatment planning.

Coretelligent’s Process: Tailoring AI Solutions to Healthcare

Selecting and Customizing AI Models: Coretelligent aids healthcare organizations in choosing the right AI models, like Azure AI, aligning them with specific use cases, and customizing them by training with relevant organizational data.

Data Lake Creation and Management: We facilitate the creation of data lakes and data warehouses by implementing a comprehensive data management strategy. We ensure efficient management and utilization of structured and unstructured data by AI services.

Ensuring Security and Data Integrity: With a focus on “Secure Healthcare AI Implementations,” we prioritize safeguarding data and ensuring its integrity, providing a secure foundation for AI integrations.

Conclusion

As the industry continues to evolve, implementing AI in healthcare will play a pivotal role in shaping future operations, patient care, and data management strategies. Coretelligent, with its expertise in digital transformation and AI Integration Solutions stands as a strategic partner for healthcare organizations. We help to ensure the integration and utilization of AI, such as Azure AI and many more, is not just seamless but also strategically aligned with organizational objectives.

Explore a partnership with Coretelligent and navigate the future of healthcare with confidence, ensuring that your organization is not just keeping pace with digital transformation but leveraging it to enhance patient care and operational efficiency. Contact us today!

Business team and digital transformation consultants talking, How to Prepare for Digital Transformation overlayed in white text with Coretelligent logo in bottom left

If you read our 5 Digital Transformation Success Factors article, you already know that accepting digital transformation as a holistic change is a first step toward success. Even if the need stems from one department, recognizing the ramifications outside of departmental bubbles is key. By taking on digital transformation, you need to be comfortable with and prepared for a total culture shift. Now that you know what success factors contribute to the best digital transformation implementations, it’s time to uncover how to achieve those successes for your own organization.

Important steps to prepare for a successful digital transformation project:

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Business team and digital transformation consultants discussing how to prepare for digital transformation

 

Identify Pain Points

Digital transformation does not mean buying new tech and hoping for the best. Strategic planning is required to ensure your digital transformation solution has successful, wide-reaching impact that helps departments work together. To achieve success, you must consider what those impacts may be and how further opportunities can enhance your business processes. This takes careful consideration and strategic planning.

If you are at the point of undertaking a digital transformation, you probably already know your pain points and needs. But if you have ever lost your glasses only to find them on your face, you know it can be easy to miss things that are right in front of you. A digital transformation consultant can help you gain an objective understanding of your business landscape and determine best how to address your needs. But a helpful first step is to begin listening your teams, customers, and competitor’s clients to prepare your discovery. Here are some suggestions:

  • Listen to your teams: Your team is what makes your business run, so knowing what is or is not allowing them to perform at their peak is critical to your overall success. What are the challenges your team encounters most frequently? What issues are having the most detrimental impact? Are certain processes particularly problematic? Are certain tools constantly failing?
  • Listen to your customers: No business can stay alive without customers, so ensuring their needs are not just met but exceeded is vital. Are your prospects able to easily engage with your products or services? Are you able to quickly react to issues and requests? Are you retaining existing customers? How do you reach them? If via a website or app, are they user friendly? Do prospective customers or existing clients have reason to question how you are collecting or storing their sensitive, personal information? Are you in compliance? How seamless are your transactions? Can you streamline processes such as onboarding or payments?
  • Listen to your competitor’s customers: You undoubtedly have a pulse on what’s happening with your competitors, but this sleuthing can also help you improve and plan your digital transformation. Read their customer reviews and identify common praise and complaints. What are they able to deliver that you don’t? What are they unable to deliver that you could do better? Research your competitors, learn from their mistakes, and see how you can solve their pain points to fix your own.

Take Stock of Your Team—and Your Clients

User adoption is critical to digital transformation success, so evaluating the skillset of your team is an essential step towards that goal. Now that you have listened to the needs of your people, it’s time to step back and evaluate their capabilities. Think about the skills of your team members; are they capable of implementing the changes you need, or will you need to bring in experts? How much training will each department require? How much training will your end users need? Will some customers require accommodation, such as more in-depth training or even retention of traditional processes, to offset steep learning curves? While you won’t have solutions to these questions yet, it’s important to keep them top-of-mind as you prepare for digital transformation. Which is why you must…

Plan Your Communication and Curriculum

Springing new tech on teams may be exciting, but not everyone will have Christmas morning elation. Be prepared for some team members to need more education than others and make accommodations for trainings. Consider training modalities like webinars or knowledge base articles to help support user adoption. The same goes for clients who are accustomed to your platforms.

Additionally, some members may find it difficult to transition away from old habits, which is why early communication is key to prepare employees (or customers) for change. Set realistic goals for transitioning to new working environments and methods, and ensure you factor those deadlines into your project timeline. And be open to feedback. Understanding what is and is not working will help you make enhancements or adjustments that will improve efficiency in the long run. A digital transformation consultant should have training modules baked into their strategy. They will help you navigate how to introduce new working methods to team members, train teams on new tech, and provide resource documentation to help guide the process.


“One of the big roles of leaders [during a digital transformation] is to create a safe, supporting environment where people are able to learn.”

Kristine Dery, Research Scientist at MIT Center for Information Systems Research
How to Nurture a Digital Workforce


Audit your tech

Take stock of the technology that you use. You may be surprised to find that services you already use can be integrated for a more robust solution or include tools that serve your unmet needs. What’s more, you may find tech that you are paying for but not utilizing, or duplicates of the same tools across multiple departments. A good digital transformation consultant will take a deep dive into your IT infrastructure ahead of a digital transformation engagement, but having a basic starting point is a good practice, even if you have an idea of the services or platforms you want to use to modernize your operations.

Consider Your Timeline and Budget

Next, consider your timelines. How urgent is your need? How quickly can your teams realistically adapt to change? Additionally, how massive is the change you are undertaking? Don’t bank on overnight results that are unachievable. Consider working in phases to keep progress at a steady pace without being overwhelming.

Also consider how much you want to invest and what makes sense for your organization. What already exists in your tech stack? What features do you really need? Do you have the right, or enough, people in place to support your initiatives? This can include leveraging ongoing support for managed services versus hiring a whole team.


How a digital transformation consultant can help you prepare for digital transformation:

Partnering with a digital transformation consultant can help you identify your pain points, devise an effective roadmap, and put together a comprehensive action plan that fits within your budget. Coretelligent’s digital transformation solutions, CoreDTS, are crafted to match the business goals of clients, pinpoint any challenges they are facing, and construct technology-driven solutions customized to meet their needs. Using agile methodology, our build-and-operate approach keeps projects running smoothly while managing costs and maintaining clear expectations for tasks. From development to deployment, to maintenance and enhancements, our clients are fully supported throughout their journey. To learn more about how we can help you on your digital transformation journey, contact one of our experts today.

Serious person working on laptop holding papers, 5 Signs Your Business Needs Digital Transformation overlayed in white text with Coretelligent logo in bottom left

Digital transformation is no longer a luxury for businesses—it’s an absolute necessity. Organizations that fail to invest in digital technology and transform their operations risk becoming obsolete in the ever-evolving business landscape. But how do you know when your company needs to make the switch? We break down the top five signs your business needs digital transformation.

Five signs that you could benefit from digital transformation services and solutions:

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Serious person working on laptop holding papers representing the signs your business needs digital transformation services and solutions

 

Your Productivity Stinks

Issue: Manual operations and outdated processes are inhibiting progress.

An effective, efficient team is critical to your bottom line. If your workforce struggles to meet deadlines, fulfill requests, or hit targets, it is time to address the roadblocks hindering their success. One of the biggest signs your business needs digital transformation is likely the most obvious: overreliance on analog operations.  Analog operations, such as paper document management or manual data entry, are some of the biggest culprits of lost time and data errors. Clunky, multi-step processes that rely on disparate, disconnected systems can also slow down performance. And accessibility issues—from remote office workers struggling to connect to on-premise servers, to personnel in the field unable to access or view information on the road—can negatively impact productivity by inhibiting secure collaboration.

These digital transformation solutions and services can modernize existing processes, streamline operations, and automate manual tasks for improved efficiency:

  • Workflow Automation
  • Data Integration
  • API Integration
  • Data Visualization
  • Application Development

You Aren’t Making Data-Driven Decisions

Issue: Lack of proper data management bars you from gaining insights.

Data is being captured at an astronomical pace that is growing every day. But no matter how many data points you collect, if you don’t have a way to properly store and synthesize that data, you simply cannot make fact-based, data-driven decisions. Common data management pain points include overwhelming amounts of data that are impossible to manage; data coming in from different sources that require consolidation; discrepancies in data and reporting; too much time list to report generation; and the inability to access historical data for trend analysis.  An effective data management system can help you store, organize, and analyze your data, and provide you with an information-rich resource to enable data-driven decision making.

Data management services that can help you gain actionable insights include:

  • Analytics Services
  • Data Integration
  • Dashboards, Reporting & Visualization
  • ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Services
  • Data Warehousing and Data Lakes
  • Data Quality
  • Data Governance
  • Database Administration

Related Content → Read about Coretelligent’s data analytics, data management, and business intelligence solutions → Data Management from Coretelligent


Your Competition is Winning

Issue: User delight is down, impacting customer retention and acquisition

If you are trailing behind your competition, chances are digital transformation can help in a variety of ways. Most directly, digital transformation services and solutions can provide an easier, more accessible way for prospects to connect with your products and services, while also helping to build trust with existing customers. Additionally, lost opportunities due to poor data management and the inability to act quickly to user demands can negatively impact your bottom line.

Digital transformation services that can have direct customer impact include:

  • UI/UX Services
  • Web Development and Enhancements
  • Application Development
  • API Integration

“The point of digital transformation isn’t to become digital.
It’s actually to generate value for the business.”
Rodney Zemmel, McKinsey & Company

You Are Losing Money

Issue: Maintaining the status quo is becoming a financial burden

Operational expenses will always be part of doing business, but an allegiance to your legacy tech or resistance to upgrading your operational processes could literally cost you. Switching from manual to digitized processes can come with obvious savings, from reduced on-premise server maintenance costs to decreased spending on physical document management. But you may be surprised at how much you are losing on legacy tech and existing systems that can be upgraded with cheaper, more effective tools or revamped to serve you better.

How digital transformation services and solutions helped reduce costs for a leasing client:

  • Coretelligent’s digital transformation services team, CoreDTS, helped a financial services client slash the bill of a popular CRM by creating an API in their web application that called on the same data using a different method. This change reduced the number of licenses required to access the data and in turn lowered their subscription cost. Finding unleveraged tools within your existing platforms, such as MS 365, or missing integration opportunities are big areas where money—and time—can be saved.

Related Content → Read about Coretelligent’s Workflow Automation Solutions


Your Business Has Changed

Issue: You need to adapt to your new normal

Has your company switched to a hybrid or remote workplace? Have you undergone a fundamental business transformation, like a merger or acquisition? Has your footprint expanded to include new divisions or locations? If any of these situations are familiar, you must adapt to your changing business needs. This includes ensuring remote workforces can continue operations smoothly and securely; ensuring data from merged businesses is strategically consolidated and leveraged; and that your business is prepared for growth and the increased level of data, security, and compliance that may be required.

Key areas of business transformation opportunity can be found in these digital transformation solution sets:

  • Data Management, Analytics, and Business Intelligence
  • Workflow Automation
  • Compliant Infrastructure
  • Emerging Technology

Digital transformation is an essential part of successful business operations. Now that you know the signs your business needs digital transformation, you can take a more proactive approach. By investing in modernizing your organization and embracing technology, you can stay ahead of the competition and continue to remain profitable. Make sure to assess your current systems and processes regularly and invest in new technologies as needed so that you can remain competitive in today’s marketplace. And if any of the signs listed above are present at your company, it may be time to consider leveraging digital transformation services and solutions.

To jumpstart your optimization journey, connect with Coretelligent’s team of digital transformation experts and get started on your path to success.

Man smiling at camera holding a laptop in conference room with 5 Digital Transformation Success Factors in white text

Man smiling at camera holding a laptop in conference room happy because he has achieved the 5 Digital Transformation Success Factors

Digital transformation is intrinsically linked to technology, but the most vital digital transformation success factors are less about tech and more about planning, strategy, and support. Here we explore our five must-haves for a successful digital transformation and how you can achieve them in your organization.

Our top 5 digital transformation success factors are:

1. Be proactive
2. Avoid Band-Aid solutions
3. Focus on the need, not the tools
4. Prioritize user adoption
5. Don’t go it alone

1. Be proactive

“The key to cutting through the confusion is to see that digital transformation is not a single thing, but a multi-faceted journey with differing goals depending on your industry and digital maturity.” – Harvard Business Review

Digital transformation is much more than implementing technology. It’s a fundamental, holistic change to the way businesses run. Whether you have identified areas of improvement or wish to undertake digital transformation as part of organizational growth, you must consider your current and long-term goals. This is likely a no-brainer. But you also must take it a step further: you must look at the total impact and buy-in for digital transformation across your entire organization. This begins with a deep understanding of your existing infrastructure, architecture, processes, and teams. (In the case of mergers and acquisitions, this includes evaluating the landscape of all organizations to ensure unified integration.) Next, stakeholders and product owners must be in alignment regarding the viability of service implementation. This includes setting practical timelines and budgets with added consideration to how change requests may influence each. Also critical is establishing realistic expectations for existing teams, including if IT teams can support new infrastructure or if support solutions like MSP services may be required.

Successful digital transformation is never impulsive or performed in a departmental vacuum, but it can be challenging to know how to take the first step towards a clear and cohesive strategy. A practical starting point begins with creating an IT Plan and road map. Download our IT Planning e-book to get started.


Related Content →  What is digital transformation? Watch the video to learn more.


2. Avoid Band-Aid solutions

Being proactive is ideal, but sometimes things need to break to galvanize us into action. And seeking quick fixes, depending on the severity of the issue, can be tempting. But patching a leak will only delay the flood. What’s worse? Small ad hoc fixes can exacerbate the issue by adding even more layers of complexity to dig through, often leading to elevated costs and delays. Resist being led astray by reactive urgency. It is important to evaluate the root cause of issues to prevent recurrence and maintain long-term success.

Working with digital transformation solution experts can help you investigate pain points and identify areas of improvement. At Coretelligent, we help clients develop the strategy required to keep digital transformation projects on track and in line with business objectives. We also help clients with ongoing maintenance and support to ensure systems stay secure and running at peak performance.

3. Focus on the need, not the tools

It is human nature to be drawn to the new shiny thing. But just because a new solution, technology, or tool seems ubiquitous doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for you.

It’s important to consider your end goals and ability to implement before making costly investments in technology that may not deliver. Consider these questions: Does the technology really serve all your needs? Does it pair well with your existing technology stack? Does your existing platform possess the same yet untapped capabilities desired? Do you have a team with the expertise and bandwidth to implement and support new initiatives?

We recently worked with a professional services client that wanted to gain insights and visualizations into disparate data but didn’t have the expertise to implement the tool they purchased for the job. Coretelligent helped the client gain insights by using their preferred tool and leveraging capabilities within their existing platform.

4. Prioritize user adoption

Another key digital transformation success factor is user adoption. This is of equal importance for both backend users and customers alike for digital transformation to succeed.

Employees

Enthusiastic user adoption is a critical component of successful digital transformation, and it starts with your employees. It can be challenging for teams to transition to new working methods, especially if they have grown accustomed to specific technologies and are comfortable with the habits they have structured around them. Introducing digitalization and automation may also create anxiety regarding job retention or skill capability. To help ease this culture shock, it is vital to keep teams informed and educated through the digital transformation journey. This includes providing training and being open to feedback, which can aid in identifying bugs and opportunities for enhancements. Ultimately, how well your teams adapt and adopt will translate directly to the effectiveness and efficiency of your digital transformation initiative.

Customers

You must also consider the impact on your customers, particularly if digital transformation will modify product adoption. As an example, a utility client wanted to enhance user onboarding but did not have the digital infrastructure to support their initiatives. They identified a need for a more robust, self-service website and a paperless method for new user registration. However, many of their existing customers were elderly, still preferring to manage accounts by mail and paper check. While it was important for the utility to create a web interface that modernized their customer journey, they needed to be sensitive to existing customers who would not or could not adopt digital practices. Ensuring all customer journeys remained intact was critical to the digital transformation, even if it meant retaining some traditional methods. Keeping all parties informed about changes and educating them on how to use new features allowed both new and existing customers to feel supported and more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

5. Don’t go it alone

At the end of the day, the root of all digital transformation success comes down to one key factor: support. This includes ensuring you have firm commitment to your digital transformation initiative from within your organization—and from digital transformation experts.

Even the best internal IT teams may fail at digital transformation because it is simply not what they do. Adding on an entire shift in operating procedure can be overwhelming to existing teams. Digital transformation experts help organizations objectively assess needs and develop a plan that modernizes, streamlines, and enhances existing practices with architecture and technology complementary to existing infrastructure.


Related Content → Read how Coretelligent’s CoreDTS team helped a client realize their digital transformation goals → Leveraging Digital Transformation: A Multiphase Case Study.


Working with a digital transformation services provider like Coretelligent goes beyond technical implementation. A major component includes advising clients throughout the digital transformation journey for continued support of their organization. By maintaining open communication with stakeholders and product owners, the collaboration allows clients to receive a total picture of their business’s innerworkings, guarantees buy-in, and provides more opportunities for improvement and finetuning along the way. Plus, digital transformation experts will provide training and support to ensure your teams are equipped to maximize the potential of your solution.

 

Person pointing to visualizations and mobile app development to the right of text The Importance of Digital Transformation in Business

Person pointing to visualizations and mobile app development to illustrate the importance of digital transformation in businessThe way we interact with technology has undergone a permanent change.

Customers now communicate virtually, make in-browser or in-app transactions, and manage accounts and sign-ups online without ever touching paper or interacting in person. Covid-19 accelerated how technology transformed business, amplifying the need for new digital processes, and our inevitable adoption of them.

The pandemic forced businesses to modify their workflow and service delivery to accommodate changes like remote work and the move away from brick-and-mortar establishments. Businesses needed to rapidly reevaluate their IT infrastructure and put mechanisms in place so they could continue to provide service and stay competitive while adapting to a changing world.

This disruption acted as a global case study for the vital need to embrace the importance of digital transformation in business. And it worked: according to Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends 2023, “94% of CEOs want to maintain or accelerate pandemic-driven digital transformation.”

So, what is digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the strategic adoption and implementation of digital technology to enhance customer experience and drive success.

From the wheel to mobile phones, technology has always been a part of our lives. The switch to digital technology is the first step towards a digital transformation. At the most basic level, this means transitioning away from all things analog, a process referred to as digitization. A common example of digitization would be a company taking data from physical repositories, such as on-premise servers or physical paper files, and moving that data to the cloud.

Inherently, moving from analog to digital means adhering to new processes that are baked into the new platform, tool, or technology that is being used, adjusting how business is conducted to suit, and using these adjustments as opportunities for change—this is digitalization. Instead of accessing a physical file cabinet to find a document, digitalization requires you to access that same data from a cloud-based content management system and follow out-of-box steps to complete tasks such as secure file sharing. This can fundamentally change the way a business runs. For instance, the process above could be the first step towards a remote work transition.

But digitized data and digitalization are only as good as what you do with their potential. Transformation is critical to developing strategy that leverages the power of both in a way complementary to your business needs.

Getting Started with Digital Transformation

Digital transformation begins with evaluating how workflows, operations, and customer success can be served better using digital technology. Expertly crafted strategy is then developed to address challenges, optimize processes, and support goals as they shift and scale. Following development, integration, implementation, and deployment of required services, digital transformation experts can provide training and support to maintain enthusiastic user adoption.

Let’s consider our example scenario above. While the company may have gained better organization and collaboration upon digitizing their data, they may still be unsatisfied with their technology investment. An evaluation conducted by digital transformation experts might uncover that the company’s team continues to struggle with data entry errors and time-consuming reporting due to manually entering data from paper forms into spreadsheets. A digital transformation strategy could include identifying ways in which the company could leverage their current technology platforms to streamline processes to capture data more securely and effectively, automate reporting, and even provide on-demand visualizations in dashboards available on mobile devices.

Digital transformation experts are key to identifying roadblocks and building strategies to help businesses overcome hurdles. By developing strategy that incorporates how to leverage the key components of your technology environment, digital transformation strategists can identify how those technologies work with existing architecture and platforms to address needs, provide opportunities for growth and enhancement, and suggest ways to economize and generate revenue. Digital transformation also considers how both business users and customers will interact with and benefit from these enhancements to ensure that all parties utilize them.

Digital Transformation Services

Digital transformation encompasses many technologies and service types. As a digital transformation service provider, Coretelligent has identified the following solutions as the most significant and sought-after digital transformation services for our clients:

In addition to being game changing standalone services, the importance of digital transformation in business is best exemplified in the way these services can work together for an even more robust impact. These services are also highly complementary and able to provide robust value as total digital transformation solutions.

Here are some of the more common digital transformation solutions:

  • Mobile app development, including UI/UX services, application integration, data warehousing, analytics and visualizations, automation services, microservices, support services
  • Website redesign, including website development, UI/UX services, ecommerce, data management, API integration, maintenance, enhancement, and support services
  • Workflow automation, including end-to-end automation services, data quality, data analytics, visualizations, and compliant infrastructure

Coretelligent’s digital transformation experts can deliver the services you need to stay competitive and agile over the competition. Coretelligent will assist you in maximizing the potential of your digital transformation from development through support using a comprehensive build-and-operate approach. We will work with you to evaluate your business needs and challenges and develop a strategy that makes use of the best available technology and your existing IT infrastructure. After deployment, we’ll make sure your solution keeps working for you by providing the maintenance, improvements, and support you need. Learn how Coretelligent can help you recognize the importance of digital transformation for your business and help you gain a competitive edge with our CoreDTS solutions.

Data Terms Data Lake vs Data Warehouse vs Data Fabric

Data Terms Data Lake vs Data Warehouse vs Data FabricOur shift to a digital world is fueling the creation of massive data reservoirs with almost unlimited potential. With this increase comes new data terms and technologies for managing and analyzing data. This digital transformation shift can result in companies generating more data than they can manage or utilize with their current infrastructure and resources if not adequately conceptualized.

Currently, we find ourselves firmly in the Zettabyte Era, a term coined back in 2016 recognizing the changeover to measuring the world’s data in terms of zettabytes. A zettabyte is a unit measurement for computing storage capacity, and it represents a whole lot of data. To provide some context, the world’s data is estimated to be just under 100 zettabytes in 2022. While in 1998, for comparison, the world’s data was estimated at just a few thousand petabytes. A zettabyte equals one million petabytes!

As digital transformation and the growth of data have become the norm, business executives must gain a broad understanding of the data landscape in order to take advantage of the business intelligence possibilities. Data management infrastructure can be complicated, and while there is no need for business leaders to become experts in data management, more knowledgeable leaders make better IT investment decisions.

Data Terms: Data Lake vs Data Warehouse vs Data Fabric

Gaining an awareness of data infrastructure terms like data lakes, data warehouses, and data fabric is a great place to start. A big picture overview of these data management technologies can only help in making more informed choices about your firm’s IT infrastructure.

What is a Data Lake?

A data lake is a centralized repository for storing enormous amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Data can be brought into a data lake from multiple and disparate data sources, validated, and optimized to improve access, connectivity, and analytics.

The main benefits of using a data lake are that it allows for cost-effective storage of large amounts of data without having to worry about the data’s format and can improve the functionality of data from multiple sources.

One pitfall of a data lake is that along with the unlimited data consolidation capabilities of the data lake, without the development of an adequate framework for enrichment and enhancement, data within a data lake is no more usable than before.

What is a Data Warehouse?

With a data warehouse data flows in from transactional systems, CRM, operational systems, and other sources, typically on a regular cadence. Business analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and decision-makers access the data through business intelligence tools and other analytics applications.

One key advantage of using a data warehouse is that it enables businesses to consolidate structured data from multiple sources into a single, centralized location to improve reporting and dashboards.

Having clearly defined and robust data governance policies is a requirement for getting the most out of a data warehouse.

What is Data Fabric?

Data fabric is a flexible data architecture that enables the integration of data from a variety of sources and cloud environments. In a sense, it knits together all the data of an organization regardless of the location or infrastructure providing a unified view of an organization’s data, making it easier for businesses to reduce data silos and better manage their data. Additionally, data fabric can help companies save money by reducing the need to duplicate data in multiple systems and providing flexible, agile, and scalable solutions for accessing and using data.

A Simplified View

Among the main differentiators among the three data structures is that data lakes can store raw data, while data warehouses only stores processed and refined data, and data fabric connects one or more of the other structures for better connectivity.

It’s About Business Intelligence

Data lakes, warehouses, and fabric are data technologies that can help businesses reduce silos and provide actionable data necessary in today’s data-driven business environment. Painting with a broad brush, they store (or can access) data in a centralized location, help businesses better understand their data, and reduce the need to duplicate data in multiple systems. Still, they have specific benefits and challenges that must be weighed against your organization’s requirements and business goals.

As with many things, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to data management and how best to gain the business intelligence (BI) needed to increase revenue, improve outcomes, and reduce the total cost of ownership.

Reach out to connect with our technical experts to discover how to optimize and utilize your data for better decision-making. Coretelligent has years of experience building and supporting customized IT infrastructure and solutions utilizing tools like Microsoft Azure, Power BI, Tableau, and other BI tools designed and built around our client’s business goals.