Over the next 5 years will focus on: Intelligent apps, analytics and the internet of things where AI & machine learning are the foundation components of all applications, services & things around us.

As a company that has been delivering hands on training and practical work experience in digital transformation, digital marketing, project management, business analysis, product management and big data analytics, we knew it was only a matter of time before we had to digitise our thriving ecosystem in order to achieve worker enablement, anytime, anywhere as our candidates continue to grow, coming from all around the world.

Stepping into the digital age, caused by digital technology perfectly integrating into consumers lifestyle, thanks to mobile, social, cloud, big data analytics and innovation accelerators such augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, cognitive systems and internet of things, we realised very quickly that if we didn’t digitise, automate and integrate into our candidate’s lifestyle, we would either end up losing our customer base to competitors or lose them all together for lack of being relevant and unable to meet their needs as upward mobile and digitally savvy users.

We didn’t waste time formulating our own digital transformation & optimisation initiative in order to stay relevant, deliver superior customer experience and digitally globalise our platform, making it accessible to anyone and everyone looking to develop their digital expertise from the convenience of their home, on the move and the ability to collaborate with other candidates anytime, anywhere and on any device.

Our goal was to disrupt the education industry. To fill the gap between gaining education, professional certification and practical work experience, which when combined, radically increases the employability rate of job seekers. We knew at an early stage that legacy approaches to IT architecture, such as our existing apps built with traditional integration techniques could not keep pace in today’s digital and needed a rethink.

We could no longer be dominated by ideas based on knee jerk reactions or a fixed set of channels that connected our customers and the organization. The increasing rise in the numbers of connected devices, digital platforms, and technologically-empowered consumers forced us to realise that we had a very little window of opportunity when it comes to customer acquisition, customer retention and customer satisfaction.

If you can't be integrated into your digitally savvy and upward mobile customers lifestyle you don't have a business.

Our mandate was clear. We were going to accelerate the business using digital technology by having a digital business transformation strategy where we could effectively address our technological and organizational challenges in order to support faster and be more responsive processes.

API (Application programming interface) management was central to our digital business transformation  strategy. We needed to create an integrated connection between our apps, data, and services. Create a unified system that fed and retrieved information from a centralised data centre and plugged into to a business intelligence tool that helped us make informed decisions.

Time was not on our side and we knew that we had to favour acquiring instead of building. With the rise of digital solution platforms with open APIs, we could identify the digital services we needed and leverage off their API platforms to transform and accelerate our business.

“DBT’s Digital Business Transformation initiative is to create a centralised customer data centre with multichannel integration across all channels, be it operational, marketing, customer experience, sales or support, enabling the business to make an informed decision through data. This will then enable the digitisation and automation of all areas of the business while having mobile first strategy which allows us to perfectly integrate into our customers lifestyle. The expected business benefits are as follows: better client acquisition better client retention, higher ROI, Increased market valuation, Strong competitive advantage & dominating the education industry by being a major disruption through the effective use of digital technology (3rd platform technology)”

The first thing we had to do was to digitise and fully integrate all of our channels to make sure they were speaking to each other by creating a centralised customer data centre, thereby having a unified system with multichannel integration.

Instead of building our own CRM system, we adopted salesforce and business intelligence analytics cloud solution. We needed to grab the opportunities presented in marketing automation and as a result, adopted Pardot marketing automation as well. Using their APIs we were able to successfully integrate these new solutions with our eWorkexperience platform creating a unified system. This created interconnectivity between finance, customer service, operations, sales, marketing and support. Creating that connected experience helped us bridge legacy systems to modern applications, enabling agile development and rapid product delivery.

Meeting the demands for faster execution and improved efficiency meant APIs running across a variety of platforms and device types, utilized both within the enterprise and by external partners.

With a fully integrated platform, we could perform actionable Intelligence, build intelligent apps by harnessing analytics and machine intelligence to make smarter decisions. This meant plugging all the data points to our business intelligence tools. We now have a strong competitive advantage unrivalled in our industry and this led us to move towards the steps of disruption within our sector.

We are now able to successfully simplify engagement with customers, while at the same time providing them with instant, accessibility and flexibility which in turn gives the business valuable data insights into our customers. It also helped us automate routine operational cloud management tasks and integrate with our existing management tools.

This is where our candidates gain practical work experience working on these innovative projects.

Today, we are helping our candidates build Intelligent apps and analytics, intelligent user interfaces, intelligent action and autonomous processes where AI & machine learning are the Foundation component of the collaborative platform built to be mobilised and social for the digitally savvy and upward mobile target audience.

We are giving them the experience and expertise required to build conversational platforms & immersive experiences.

Intelligent capabilities form the backbone of all your systems, merging the real world and virtual world together to create a future digital reality and maximising and optimising the connectivity between people, processes and technology.

It is the experienced gained here that we now use to help our candidates gain hands on training and practical work experience within the digital space cutting across all sectors and allowing them to conveniently gain access to the eWork 4.0’s thriving ecosystem, accessible, anytime and anywhere.