Many organizations are facing a digital transformation imperative. Digital transformation elicits varying definitions. In short, it can be defined as an ongoing process in which organizations adapt to or drive disruptive positive changes and experiences for their customers and markets by leveraging digital technologies.
A survey by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting found that digital transformation is integral to business success. The digital imperative is clear: “adopt new technologies effectively or face competitive obsolescence.” It is no wonder that digitization efforts are becoming increasingly important for many business leaders – especially CIOs – who view the movement as necessary for organization growth.
In our most recent Connectivity Benchmark Report, we surveyed over 950 IT decision makers (ITDMs), and found that 88% of respondents are either executing on digital transformation at their organizations now, or will be within the next three years. The focus on the strategic importance of digitization has led to increased budgets for ITDMs and C-level executives. Approximately 79% of ITDMs we surveyed stated that they will see their budgets increase this year.
A report by IDC Research Inc. forecasts that worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies will top $1.2 trillion in 2017, a 17.8% increase from 2016. The IDC predicts that the rate of spending will remain at this pace over the next few years, reaching a whopping $2 trillion in 2020, with some of the fastest growing technologies being cloud infrastructure, applications, and business services technologies.
These high budgets demonstrate that digital transformation is an increasing priority for businesses of all industries––from banking and retail to manufacturing and healthcare. Although spending on digital transformation continues to increase at a high pace, businesses are not seeing consistent results. This is largely due to the lack of necessary resources, which are preventing businesses from achieving results from their efforts.
Results from our Connectivity Benchmark Report show that 60% of ITDMs and leaders spearheading digital transformation initiatives still feel they are inadequately resourced to meet their company’s digitization efforts. The survey showed that some of the obstacles that hinder digital transformation include time constraints (41%), a misalignment between business and IT (40%), and the inability to integrate siloed applications and data (39%).
These obstacles hinder business’ ability to achieve digital transformation. It’s not particularly difficult to understand why. Businesses are pivoting to respond to more and more digital transformation technologies, such as cloud computing, mobile, and SaaS. And IT is charged with implementing these responses; however, there are many digital forces and IT only has a limited amount of resources to respond to them.
As a result, many organizations are seeing a growing gap between what the business wants and IT’s capacity to deliver to ensure digital transformation. This gap – the IT delivery gap – necessitates a new approach to project delivery and a technology strategy that scales IT’s capacity and enables them to better respond to digital transformation forces. This new approach can be achieved by rethinking IT’s role in the business.
Rethinking IT’s role may seem daunting, but it is possible. Explore the CIO’s guide to digital transformation strategy, or read our latest whitepaper to learn more about the IT delivery gap, how organizations can close it, and what tactics successful organizations are using to increase productivity and scale in order to achieve digital transformation.
