Industry Fails of Lacking a Transformational Approach
Many firms were pushed to speed up their digital initiatives and move experimental programs into production quickly because of Covid-19. The emerging digital economy requires clients to capitalize on their data growth and develop new products and services. As data is dispersed over multiple clouds, devices, and machines, it is difficult to get the appropriate data to the right place.
As such, organizations of all shapes and sizes, and across all industries, are looking to adopt digital transformation projects in order to increase production, efficiency, and profit. The automation of previously manual operations is part of some projects, while the replacement of outdated technology with more modern alternatives is the goal of others.
In theory, digital transformation should make a company’s workflow more efficient and less error-prone, but in practice it is not always that simple. According to a 2020 report, even when CEOs are on the same page, 70% of digital transformation projects fail to meet their objectives.
Cloud, DevOps, and product delivery are reshaping the Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) industry, requiring a shift in organizational structure. It is imperative that I&O executives consider the pros and cons of each organizational structure model before deciding on the best approach to take.
If you find yourself struggling with adopting, implementing, or accelerating digital transformation, you are not alone. The culprit? The lack of true business and IT alignment.
Reasons Why Companies Fail at Digital Transformation
Poor Onboarding Processes
One of the most typical causes of failing digital transformation projects are misalignment of business and IT alignment, poor onboarding processes, and lack of purpose-built systems for onboarding and deployment. Transparency and accountability are absent from standard project and collaboration platforms.
New Tech Doesn’t Mesh Well with Broken Processes
Digital transformation often disappoints due to layering the latest technologies onto broken processes and teams that are resistant to change. Leaders can improve business transformation results by developing integrated strategies that start with a goal-driven process and organizational design change management. Digital innovations should better enable and harmonize those efforts.
Missing User Experience Goals
When attempting to move hundreds of traditional programs to the cloud, the failure rate increases. The end-user experience is often neglected by businesses, which is why they don’t properly benchmark the end-user experience before, during, and after migrations. The target is often missed because of a lack of clear goals for the end-user experience and precise methods for measuring it.
Miscommunication → Misunderstanding
When attempting to move hundreds of traditional programs to the cloud, the failure rate increases. The end-user experience is often neglected by businesses, which is why they don’t properly benchmark the end-user experience before, during, and after migrations. The target is often missed because of a lack of clear goals for the end-user experience and precise methods for measuring it.
Digitization is not Digitalization
Failure to distinguish between digitization and digitalization, the act of converting products and processes to digital form, is a common pitfall for businesses embarking on the digital transformation journey. When it comes to the digital transformation of your business, digitization is a must.
Outdated Tech Stacks
An obsolete technology stack is one of the reasons digital transformation programs fail to meet their objectives coupled with lack of business and IT alignment, even when the leadership is aligned. Your company’s technology stack should help sales and marketing teams work together more effectively by providing them with all the tools, services, and data they need to succeed. Digital transformation plans will fail if they do not include it.
Lacking Vision
Transformation efforts that succeed have a clear vision of the future that is easy to explain and appealing to customers, investors, and employees. A five-year plan’s figures can never capture the scope of a goal. A vision is a statement that helps an organization understand where it needs to go. Often, the first draft is composed mostly by a single person. At first, it can be a little hazy. Something far better comes to light after 3 or 5 years of hard labor and some fantasizing by the coalition members. A plan for bringing that vision to fruition is formulated at some point as well.
It’s easy for a transformation effort to become a list of projects that don’t fit together, which might lead the company in the wrong direction or nowhere at all. No matter how much effort is put into any of these projects, they won’t add up to something important without a clear vision of the company’s long-term goals.
Why Business and IT Alignment is the Key for Successful Digital Transformation
More than 70 percent of senior leaders, according to the Gartner report “The CIO’s Role in Preparing for Digital Business Acceleration,” “recognize digital technology as integral to revenue achievement, product development, customer engagement, and the advancement of strategic operational processes.”
Sourcing managers are under pressure to find, select, and provide the correct strategic solutions to accomplish key business objectives quickly and cost-effectively, while taking into account the evolving business organization’s future requirements. Increasingly, sourcing managers will act as a broker and integrator of diverse internal and external capabilities, services, and solutions in this capacity.
Technology can be thrilling, but it is frequently costly and less effective than anticipated. By cooperating and aligning, the business and IT team can ensure that the ROI is there, supported, and appropriate for the organization. The precise business and IT alignment enables and accelerates the attainment of company goals, engages customers and workers, and fosters innovation in both product and process.
The role of IT in today’s business is no longer that of a supporting actor, but rather one of the primary engines. Internet and digitalization have transformed how people work and interact with organizations as well as with one another, and this has been the driving force behind company growth for decades. That’s why IT-business alignment is critical to a company’s long-term viability.
IT-business alignment has just recently become the standard in most businesses, and as such, a growing number of them are embracing “cloud-first” sourcing strategies. While there are many advantages to using cloud services, they aren’t appropriate for every project. When analyzing cloud and traditional delivery models, sourcing managers need to align business and IT strategies and viewpoints.
