Where is your company on the path to digital transformation? Take this nine-question assessment to find out how ready you are—and to learn why digital transformation is so important.
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Where is your company on the path to digital transformation? Take this nine-question assessment to find out how ready you are—and to learn why digital transformation is so important.
Cloud computing is becoming the dominant technology platform. The cost, scalability, and speed that cloud allows is too powerful to resist.
The rationale for not moving — the cloud's not secure, reliable, or compliant enough — are falling by the wayside. "As adoption continues to grow," Accenture maintains, "those organizations who don't make this move will become less competitive."
While cloud software, infrastructure, and platforms are more cost effective than their on-premises cousins, the cloud model's truly transformational benefits are in the realm of greater agility and accelerated time-to-innovation. Cloud is one of the key enablers for companies/organizations looking to shift their IT spending from ongoing system support and maintenance to the higher-level, innovative IT work that excites customers and reduces total cost of operation.
Everyone now has vast amounts of consumer and company data, but the big payoff will come only when you can unlock that data from its silo and view it as informed insights that allow you to anticipate customer needs and market trends and identify new prospects and channels.
"Insight-driven organizations" is what Deloitte calls such enterprises. Until now, most big data analytics projects have required highly skilled scientists and other experts. A major challenge is to put these analytics tools into the hands of front-line business decision makers.
Just because we live on our phones doesn't mean we've cracked the code for delivering the mobile apps our customers or employees need.
Mobile apps will increasingly help make a customer's experience better. But employee-facing mobile apps lag as well. In a survey of 690 Oracle User Group members, only 18 percent said their organization's enterprise applications are either highly or somewhat mobile.
A 2017 Accenture report provides some insight to IoT trends:
Yet Accenture estimates that the IoT could add $14 trillion to the world economy by 2030. Today, much of the IoT focus is on improving productivity and cutting costs, but the next wave will be about creating entirely new experiences.
Agility and speed are essential digital transformation components that help meet rising customer expectations. Car buyers might be happy to keep their vehicle for eight years, but they'll increasingly expect that the software gets updated every year or two to modernize and improve that vehicle. If people buy an internet-connected product, and then call customer support, they'll expect that company to know how they use the product and have support tailored to that usage. Agility is about more than executing on the actual product development or customer support; it's about how long it takes to get approvals and make decisions.
One of the most telling measures of whether a company's digital transformation efforts are pointed in the right direction is whether IT spending goes to technologies that yield a competitive advantage versus those that simply keep the lights on.
The more you spend to manage underutilized serves and storage, run legacy data centers, integrate a sprawl of applications, and oversee myriad strategic vendors, the less proactive and innovative you are. You can't transform your business without simplifying and relocating unproductive IT spending first.
True transformation can only occur when the new technology a business acquires and implements actually changes how they do business. Instead of time and money spent on updating and managing outdated legacy IT, that energy goes into innovating new IT technologies to expand offerings to customers. Instead of working in disparate and unconnected systems, teams are realizing system integrations to simplify and coordinate their efforts. Instead of losing productivity provisioning on-prem resources, developers are spinning up new apps in a instantly-available cloud platform.
Digital transformation is a collaborative effort, requiring buy-in from top to bottom and coordination across the organization. Ultimately, digital transformation is rooted in cultural change.
