10 Strategic Smart Enterprise Drivers for 2023

Businesses are currently weighing the impact of rapidly changing economic conditions, as well as disruptions in supply chains and energy sourcing. Digital transformation is recreating business models, changing the way customers and employees interact and altering entire industries. Making sense of such disruptive changes has never been so important to transform intelligently instead of being left behind.

As an information and communications technology (ICT) leader with over 120 years of expertise and experience, NEC is sharing its views on leading and emerging trends and technologies to help your Smart Enterprise anchor its strategic investments. Explore NEC’s Top 10 Strategic Enterprise Drivers and discover how to navigate through the developments to simplify your organization, realize workforce efficiencies, deliver superior customer services and gain a competitive advantage.

1. Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is key for enterprises to enrich their operations with innovative solutions that optimize business practices, drive workforce engagement and create a competitive edge. Digital adoption and automation are key to operational excellence and indispensable for organizations to survive. Equipment, functions and processes are becoming more and more software driven, making them more responsive to changing requirements.

2. Ubiquitous Connectedness

Organizations are capitalizing on mobility solutions that enable employees to work from just about anywhere, at any given time, whether on-site, at home, between appointments or while traveling. Technology ensures they remain fully integrated with their organizations, colleagues and customers. Work/life balance is enriched by the power of the smartphone, serving both business and private communications.

3. Smart, Collaborative Workspaces

The traditional office is shrinking, and working from home is fully accepted. With hybrid work being the new normal workstyle, tools that support a flexible, open and agile way of working — like unified communications and collaboration (UCC) — are a mandatory part of running a successful business. Remote workers need to feel engaged and included in company culture. At the same time, smart enterprises must adopt workplace management solutions that create environments for maximizing not only employee productivity and well-being, but also workplace safety and efficiency as some workers return to the office. Automated reservation and touchless check-in allow both workers and visitors to quickly and safely use office space as often as needed.

4. Driving Engagement

Companies are pushing hard to deliver connected customer experiences (CX) across media, channels, processes, and departments — making contact easy and pleasant, lowering thresholds, presenting options most relevant to the customer, and ensuring swift response to queries. Smart enterprises reinvent their customer engagement models to deliver customers a distinctive, personalized experience and ensure a long-lasting relationship.

5. The Return of Cost Consciousness

Until recently, businesses were predominantly focused on post-pandemic growth. In 2023, cost reduction and optimization will play a more prominent role in decision making. Rising interest rates and volatile labor, materials and energy prices are forcing enterprises to revisit their balance sheets and cut costs by optimizing out-of-pocket spending such as IT infrastructure and office space. Businesses that adopt pay-per-use and flexible will be able to reduce upfront costs and pay only for what is currently needed, while also giving themselves the flexibility for future expansion. Customers will benefit from easier financial management and predictable overall monthly costs. Smart enterprises will embrace the cost-effectiveness and flexibility of month-to-month contracts with the flexibility to scale up or down as needed.

6. Cloud-centric Optimization

Cloud computing has revolutionized IT and software delivery. Applications running in the cloud make it incredibly easy for users to sign up, access and draw on solutions available on demand and within minutes. Cloud-based deployments consequently adopt new functionality much faster and more easily than their on-premises counterparts, with new applications driving rapid innovation.

7. Securing the Data-Driven Enterprise

The power of capturing, processing, and analyzing data offers tremendous opportunities to drive better business intelligence, product development and customer service. Real-time business processes and workflows also require swift retrieval of data at the moment of need. As data sets grow, storage solutions need to become more flexible and scalable as organizations find it increasingly complex to store, protect, and manage all collected information.

8. Business Resilience and Continuity

Today’s enterprises depend on reliable access to applications, information and people to persistently operate smartly and compete effectively. This requires a robust communications and IT infrastructure capable of providing always-on availability that can also self-heal should service disruptions occur. Navigating these disruptions calls for a more holistic and proactive strategy with respect to sourcing and securing resources across a variety of key areas.

9. Extended Reality

Analytics tools have historically been focused on descriptive outcomes, but now their applications are shifting toward predicting future events and behavior and recommending how to react to outcomes. In 2023, AI tools will become widely available through cloud platforms and open source software. Businesses will ramp up their usage to streamline efficiency for the organization and achieve new levels of engagement, drawing on elements such as emotion recognition and behavior analysis.

10. Smart, Sustainable Society

Important steps are being made towards building smarter societies — where information and communications technologies ensure energy efficiency, sustainable economic development, safety and security, along with wise management of natural resources. Connected processes and collaboration will save time and reduce costs, scope and impact of physical travel and transportation. Digital technologies will support the incorporation of circular economy principles into businesses and society, facilitating the redesign of products and value chains.

By embracing digital transformation and enabling advanced approaches to how communications and IT services are delivered and managed, NEC provides new ways for Smart Enterprises to thrive and grow.

To learn more, visit https://www.necam.com/.

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