Many enterprises have a digital transformation strategy at the center of their goals and objectives for the coming years. They may include incremental steps or sweeping changes, but they all ultimately focus on delivering a better customer experience, whether that customer is an employee or a client.
What often stalls these enterprises in their digital transformation efforts, and may be impacting your own, is the lack of integration between the business and IT sides of the strategy. In taking steps to implement a plan that effectively joins the efforts of these two areas, four key elements must be included:
Compliance, governance, and risk management: The overarching objectives must include policies, systems, and processes that protect company and client data. Enterprises must select technology partners that are able to support their security and compliance policies.
Agility: As business needs change, and customer expectations shift, IT must be able to work closely with line-of-business managers to quickly deliver technology solutions that support changing business goals. If an organization is bogged down by network infrastructure limitations, an IT department that is consistently backlogged, or leadership that is reluctant to innovate, agility may be sacrificed.
Data management and sharing: One of the key factors pushing digital transformation is how well an enterprise manages the flood of data coming from an array of sources, including cloud solutions and website analytics. Using this information to better anticipate customer preferences and problems or to understand inventory patterns can introduce new levels of satisfaction for customers and efficiency for enterprises. Too many companies are sitting on data without the systems for sorting, analyzing, and drawing insights that impact business outcomes.
Adequate skills: Having the right skills within the enterprise also plays an important role in whether a digital transformation is successful. For instance, success is often possible when the enterprise embraces technology in an as-a-service model, allowing managed service providers to fill the gaps in their organization’s skill and lightening the load on their in-house IT staff. For services like software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), there are important benefits to be gained, but few enterprises have the resources or talent in-house to support an entirely new approach to networking.
Related to keeping the right talent in-house and knowing when to outsource tasks to a managed service provider is the topic of automation, which can also lighten the load on the IT department. A strategy for digital transformation should also include objectives for automating key tasks so IT professionals can trade routine tasks for projects that are focused on the vision for the customer experience.
Overall, if your enterprise is going to successfully execute on a digital transformation strategy, IT must be involved with driving the direction of the business. Otherwise, they’ll continue supporting the status quo and you may watch your competitors move past you to capture more of the market.
If you’re interested in exploring cloud solutions to better equip your enterprise for digital transformation, contact us at Access Tech.
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