Over the past year, the world was disturbed by enormous uncertainties that posed many challenges to our life, work and production.

Fortunately we soon figured out the finite way to overcome the challenges of uncertainties, which is digitalization. More enterprises are presently shifting to online business process and making use of digital technologies to improve operation efficiency and cut down costs. 

The digital operation business of iSoftStone is pertinent to this issue—utilizing its own digital technologies and solutions, and integrating resources by ecology cooperation to help clients digitalize their whole business process and thus win a finite future.

Changes brought forth by accelerated digitalization 

Under the global pandemic in 2020, all enterprises came to realize the value of digitalization, and participated in the process of digital transformation either passively or actively. 

IDC, a market consulting company predicted that 65 percent of the global GDP will be digitally driven by 2022. In China, many enterprises originally planned to finish the digitalization in 3 to 5 years, and now the duration is shortened to 1 to 2 years. 

Compared with the past, the whole end-to-end business process of enterprises is undergoing the digitalization process. Such digital transformation is not only driven by conventional IT departments but those business units in direct contact with customers. 

Such changes give full play to the role of digital technology unprecedentedly that helps enterprises realize efficient, agile and intelligent digital-driven operation and management. The booming digital operation market benefits from the trend and becomes the foundation of digital transformation of enterprises. With the essence of "big data + algorithm", it resolves the uncertainties of complex environment in a smart way to optimize the resource allocation efficiency and create the corporate core competitiveness.

Driven by the thriving digital economy, the growth of digital operation business is strongly supported by the relevant government authorities.

China's Fourteenth Five-year Plan for the first time sets a separate chapter on digitalization that stresses on the action of "cloud service, digital application and intelligent empowerment", promoting coordinated transformation of the whole industry chain by digital empowerment, deepening digital application in R&D and design, production and manufacturing, operation management, market service, etc., and advancing in-depth digital transformation of service industry.

In January last year, eight national authorities including the Ministry of Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission issued the Guiding Opinions on Accelerated Transformation and Upgrading of Service Outsourcing that clarified the new trend of service outsourcing of digitalization, intelligence, high-end and integration. It encouraged enterprises to divest non-core businesses and outsource the operation services of supply chain, call center, online marketing and promotion, financial back-end, procurement, etc. 

Thanks to the dual drivers of customer needs and industrial policies, China's digital operation market has experienced scale-up development year by year. 

Extension from backend service to frontend marketing 

In the past, for a long time the digital operation services mainly included the backend businesses like customer service and business process to better the satisfaction of the original customers, and help cost reduction and efficiency improvement. As the digital transformation goes deeper, the digital operation services more extend to the frontend businesses like marketing and sales to help enterprises steel a march in business opportunities, market exploration, sustainable operation, etc.

Such transformation gives full play to the value of digital technology in the whole business process. By coordinating business process, technological resources and big data, enterprises can quickly respond to customer needs, improve user experience, streamline business operation efficiency with better quality, and thus create all-business value. Internally it is categorized as customer service, digital content service and business process service. At the same time, iSoftStone vigorously explores digital marketing and user experience services. By consultancy and strategy design, whole-process digital user experience, development of customized marketing platforms and other services, iSoftStone discovers user value in a deeper level, helps enterprises explore the infinite possibilities of operation process, and provides impetus to their growth.

As a result, despite a late start in the race of digital operation, iSoftStone seizes the strong demand of the head enterprises engaged in Internet, e-commerce, telecommunication, etc. and maintains over 50 percent of compound annual growth rate of digital operation business. It is taken as one of two pillar businesses of the company with the target of a twofold growth in the next three years.

In addition to those enterprises with Internet genes, the progressive digital transformation will also bring a huge increase of the digital operation demand of traditional industries and enterprises, leading to rapid development of the market as a whole. ISoftStone has been actively exploring traditional sectors like finance, automobile, logistics and retail to provide diversified digital operation services.

 Stride towards an "ecology- and platform-oriented" new era

From Internet to traditional industries, and from backend service to frontend marketing, digital operation is creating bigger value for corporate business. Driven by such changes, digital operation services also present many new trends and features.

Facing changeable market and customer needs, iSoftStone sets the two major orientations of "ecology" and "platform" of digital operation business, and takes the two-track approach of "resource + technology" to guarantee adequate business flexibility on demand based on the standardized products of digital operation service.

Digital operation is a typical labor-intensified industry and its rapid development is boosted by abundant supply of high-quality labor force in China. The real-time business needs to quickly recruit a large number of employees with high requirements on employment and training. ISoftStone launches Zhaozhaole App and mini program and turns it into a lightweight recruitment tool of digital operation service dedicated to mobile terminals, which helps build a sufficient talent pool and explores diversified means of employment.

To further attract and gather resources, iSoftStone tries hard to improve the ecology delivery ability and integrate both interior and exterior resources including its talent empowerment, AI algorithm of technical partners and crowd-sourcing matchmaking for other partners so as to form a powerful ecosystem and strengthen the ability of serving customers collectively.

The emerging technologies like big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things and AI inject new vitality into the digital operation market for digitalized, scale-up and intelligent business, which is also one of the core competitive advantages of iSoftStone despite a late start.

Through endless efforts on technology research and development, iSoftStone has established a digital and intelligent IT platform for digital operation businesses that includes reviewing and labeling system, customer service system, lean Kanban system, excellent operation system, etc.

For example, the intelligent review platform integrates technologies like NLP, CNN and COR to recognize data of voice, text, image, behavioral characteristics and is able to provide SaaS service under the cloud deployment mode. Such platform can be extensively applied in intelligent search, Internet content, science and technology manufacturing, insurance and finance, medical insurance, new retail, etc. with higher efficiency and lower labor cost and operation risk.

With improved technical capabilities and diversifying technical approaches, the technologies like automation, machine learning and PRA will play a critical role in improving the efficiency of digital operation. More importantly, they can liberate people from complex, trivial and mechanical workload so that they can take more creative jobs and maximize the value of human beings.

As more enterprises become deep users of digital operation in the future, the digital operation market scale will further expand, which will definitely be an integral part of digital economy. ISoftStone attracts and gathers resources by "ecology" and accumulates technological capabilities by "platform", which will further upgrade its competence of digital operation service and usher in a new stage of high-quality development.