Missteps in Digital Transformation

Digital transformation can be a process that stretches across multiple years and involves several key stakeholders and their teams. When the process stalls out, as it often does, the missed opportunities can lead to discussions of blame. Who’s responsible when digital transformation gets stuck or doesn’t deliver the anticipated innovation or growth?

The story varies across each industry and enterprise, but there are a few themes that emerge for common culprits in technology bottlenecks:

Nobody’s sure who’s driving digital transformation. In some organizations, there’s some lack of definition when it comes to who is holding reins for the process. In some enterprises, it’s appropriate for the CEO to direct the change, because they are also responsible for balancing the investment in technology with delivering expected revenue growth. In many cases, the CEO lacks the insight into the IT world to be able to put teeth to promises and deliver the innovation expected.

When IT is directing the process, there’s sometimes a disconnect between a director that’s been accustomed to simply keeping the lights on moving into a role where they’re directing vision for customer experience and productivity levels. That’s why in many organizations the trend is moving toward shared responsibility between CEO and a CIO, with the CIO demonstrating skills in participating at the visionary level and working with line of business managers to determine priorities for technological investment.

The management of data is dominating discussions. Enterprises are also flooded with data, and deciding what to do with that data is creating a bottleneck. The common mistake that’s emerging is that organizations start managing the data before they know what they want to do with it. Investing in a particular cloud data storage solution before you know how often you’ll want to access that data, for instance, can be a costly mistake.

It’s important that enterprises define the questions they would like to ask and then use data to inform their decision-making and create predictions for customer behaviors.

Enterprises make a move without all the information. The drive to push through digital transformation often leads enterprises to a path that isn’t fully planned and doesn’t take enough factors into consideration. An organization may rush to deploy a set of new Internet of Things (IoT) devices without considering the congestion and security concerns they’re adding to the network, for example. A cloud migration that doesn’t have policy set up for determining where a workload should be housed is another misstep that can derail a digital transformation strategy.

When you embark on digital transformation, you need a technology partner that acts as an extension of your business operations. Contact us at One Connect to learn more about the steps you need to take to ensure a seamless transition to cloud solutions.