Your company either is or soon will be considering or pursuing some initiative related to digital transformation. Those efforts promise great rewards, but also come with considerable risks, to your company and your career. In this article we bring you some ideas about how you can maximize the benefits and minimize the risks.
Digital Transformation: What It Means and Why It Matters
The term digital transformation involves using IT to transform user experiences, business processes, and IT operations. Digital transformation has the potential to make your customers happy and your business more successful. It also has the potential, however, to disappoint your customers and hobble your business and your career.
ZDNet recently reported the results of a survey of 450 IT and digital leaders conducted by Couchbase, an enterprise data platform provider. The digital transformation benefits report concluded:
- Increased worker productivity (65%)
- Improved business end-user experience (65%)
- Improved compliance (69%)
- Expansion into new regions (62%), and
- Improved customer experience (55%)
Successful projects occur throughout entire organizations, from business processes (85%) to customer-facing experiences as well as machine-to-machine services (both 81%) to worker-facing experiences (69%).
Such benefits, however, do not come easily or at a reduced price. The survey estimates that the average amount spent on digital transformation will be $28 million per enterprise.
In addition, more than half of the respondents i.e., 52 percent believe there is a great potential of waste and dashed expectations that will go with these investments. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, 95 percent of respondents believe that digital transformation can seem an insurmountable task.”
A major obstacle to success is the limitations of incumbent systems. 87 percent of organizations find they have to scale back ambitions for new applications and services. This is done so that they will work with IoT or mobile devices, since these devices cannot match the data processing power of larger servers, and cannot guarantee a consistent connection. Only 29 percent of organizations claim that they can use data in real-time, limiting the end-user experience and the services they can offer.
Success with your digital transformation efforts requires you to find ways to overcome these limitations. You must then enhance your legacy environment with tools and processes that enable access to the benefits those efforts promise. You must also do all this economically and securely, and without any major disruptions to current business operations.
Digital Transformation: What Now
You must build your digital transformation efforts on a firm, flexible foundation that incorporates your most valuable incumbent IT assets. A strong first step is to develop a complete picture of those assets.
You must know what they are, where they are, what they do and the relationships that connect them to each other, your users, and your business. You must also be able to keep that information accurate, complete, and current.
Once you have implemented IT discovery and service mapping of your assets and their relationships, you can achieve comprehensive and effective management of those assets.
Good IT asset management (ITAM) enables you to govern the behavior of your assets with business-driven processes. ITAM can also help you improve the agility and security of your environment, making it a stronger foundation for digital transformation. With comprehensive IT discovery, business service mapping, and effective ITAM, you can focus on the IT and business services your environment enables for your customers and users.
(See, What is ITSM in 2020?)
With IT service management (ITSM), you can manage IT incidents, problems, changes and resource requests centrally and consistently. You can also deliver new and improved business services quicker and more securely. Such services put an engaging, productivity-enhancing face on your digital transformation efforts.
Virima offers solutions for IT discovery, ITAM, and ITSM that can help you achieve and sustain a successful digital transformation. Virima features can help you identify, map, and manage your IT resources, and deliver the modern, secure and productivity-enhancing services your users want and your business requires.
To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
