Digital transformation is what analysts, tech vendors and IT professionals call the latest move towards business innovation.

As this blog explains, organizations are finding that their digital strategy is increasingly being driven by changing market events – digital disruption– and the desire to improve the customer experience (CX) by better understanding how they engage with their products and services.

There will be no turning back. As Accenture research discovered, more than 65% of consumers rely on digital channels for product and service selection, speed and information accuracy, with the same percentage judging companies primarily on the quality of their customer experience. And expectations have never been higher.

Keep the (digital) customer satisfied

Digital technologies such as web, mobile, Cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) have changed the way we live our personal lives and how we engage with businesses. Gartner predicts that this year will see more than half of the world’s population become digital subscribers and fuel expectations of easily consumed, tailor-made content, to be available on-demand and accessible from their device of choice.

It’s not something companies can get wrong. Organizations will probably be aware that more than 80% of the customers who switched to more digitally-savvy competitors could have been retained with a better digital experience. So who is best prepared for the new world of digital natural selection?

Smaller IT shops, born of new technology and running flexible processes, have a clear advantage. Better prepared to leverage consumer feedback in creating and delivering more focused products, faster, they can use disruption to challenge established incumbents. Across the sectors, from medical to manufacturing, entrenched enterprises are being left behind by the pace of change.

COBOL in the digital world?

In the new, shiny world of digitalization, systems of record written in COBOL are viewed as obstacles to progress, to faster delivery and new innovation. So what are the options for businesses with decades of IT investment and a new CIO directive to suddenly shift to a digital-firststrategy?

When transforming any aspect of a business, whether it’s a single application or process, or the wider culture, business leaders must begin with a clear understanding of what ‘digital’ success looks like to that organization. CIOs, IT Managers, and dev teams have different definitions – some are strategic, others more tactical – and some are more concerned with the purely practical. However the imperative to improve the customer experience is paramount. Intuitive, content-rich, adaptive to new technologies and easily accessed, the CX should modify business behavior towards a customer-first approach.

Digital – the new frontier for business

The customer experience underpins digital transformation and improves business productivity. New hires with access to a better, faster, more intuitive application experience need less training and have more time for customers. In this world, every business is a software organization that creates a USP – a clear differentiator – using unique, software-generated ‘experiences’ for the end user. In this definition, success is building enduring customer loyalty and using it to access new markets.

But what about longer-established enterprise shops running COBOL? Where can their products take them? There’s good news. Micro Focus remains committed to a strong technology roadmap, supported by millions of R&D dollars, focused on innovation and customer success. Creating and refreshing technology solutions that enable the enterprise to reinvent their IT assets for the new reality remains a core tenet and guiding principle. And here’s the proof.

Drum roll, please

Say hello to a new UI transformation solution for ACUCOBOL customers—AcuToWeb®. With the latest version of extend® (v10.1) and AcuToWeb, organizations can instantly transform their COBOL applications by enabling browser access across multiple platforms.