Digital Transformation puts the technology at the heart of an organization’s products, services, and operations – to help accelerate the business and competitively differentiate itself- in order to improve the experience for its customers. Let’s take a few examples from industries that are redefining the way business is done.
Uber has changed the transportation industry without owning a vehicle!
Similarly, Facebook for the media industry without its own content!
There are 5 types of businesses that are on the path to their digital future, based on a study by Dell with 4 thousand participants.
- Digital Laggards (15%) – don’t have a digital plan, limited initiatives
- Digital Adopters (14%) – have a mature digital plan, investments, and innovations in place
- Digital Evaluators (34%) – Cautiously and gradually embracing digital transformation, planning, and investing for the future.
- Digital Followers (32%) – few digital investments, tentatively starting to plan for feature
- Digital Leaders (5%) – digital transformation is ingrained in the DNA of the business
Digitalization plays a vital role for businesses to succeed in the digital world. Let’s look at some business challenges in the digital world:
- Shrinking Market Opportunities
- Rising Competition
- The implication of the third Platform and IoT
- Time to market
- Accurate prediction and planning for future business
Aside from these challenges, IT also has its issues in supporting business challenges, which include the following:
- Data growth
- Aging technology, facilities, and the outdated policies
- Poor scalability, performance, and security
- Shadow IT -Bypassing IT and looking elsewhere for IT services create a shadow of IT within the organization.
- Technologies fail to support customer growth
- Financial Pressure
Based on these challenges, what does IT need to overcome them?
- Become a strategic business partner
- Be a service-centric instead of technology-centric
- Focus on managing the supply and demand of services instead of delivery and management of assets
- Build products and services that support business objectives (revenue growth)
- Cultivate the line of the business relationship – IT values and accomplishments should be communicated in terms that matter to business executives.
To survive in the business, the organization must transform and adopt cloud computing to support digital and IT transformation. How do the cloud help digital and IT transformation?
- Business agility
- Ensure quick time to market and improved competitive advantage
- Reduce IT infrastructure investment
- Improve resource utilization
- Reduction of IT management complexity and cost
And last but not least, IT transformation does not come from technology alone. It requires a transformation of IT operations, which is all about transforming: people, processes, and technology