Achieving digital transformation in today’s competitive environment
The overwhelming majority of leaders agree that in order to produce better outcomes, organisations need visibility into business planning processes, and software development better linked with business objectives. However, only 62% of the leaders say that they can provide such visibility, and just 54% align their software with their objectives.
These are the findings from the Digital Transformation Progress Report that I have been reviewing for Digital.ai, creator of the industry’s leading value stream platform. The report details findings from a survey of 600+ enterprise IT, Security, and Business decision-makers, on the state of digital transformation in their business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So how can organisations produce better digital transformation outcomes? For smaller teams, this may be more straightforward: “Most of today’s Agile and DevOps tools are designed for the workgroup, making visibility and alignment fairly easy to achieve at the team level” says Derek Langone, Head of Strategic Transformation at Digital.ai. “…We’ve found that in large enterprises that succeed at true digital transformation, business and technology teams work collaboratively to define value and drive outcomes. These companies typically organize themselves in terms of value streams, employ an open approach to sharing information, and leverage enterprise-grade solutions that offer full visibility and rich, predictive insights across the entire organisation.”
Automation and Value Stream platforms can go a long way to help organisations overcome key obstacles and enable them to achieve more of the intended results of digital transformation. They ensure that there is a continuous stream of high-quality software-based solutions being delivered into production.
However, the size and heritage of large established organisations can often result in quite a distance between speed of software delivery deployment and the impact that has on business-focused objectives of the organisation. Closing this gap requires change beyond technology – to embrace the people, the skills, the organisation, the business model, the way of thinking and the culture to work in a completely different way for a digital world. They must move quickly to create digital products and deliver them digitally to an audience that demands digital interaction.
These are the kinds of challenges we’re addressing in the work we’re delivering. It is particularly seen in The DIGIT Lab, a Next Stage Digital Economy Centre led by INDEX, working with large established organisations to understand barriers to driving change and improving productivity through digital transformation, using responsible and sustainable approaches to innovation. Closing the gap between business value and digital technology change is central to our work.
The gap between investing in business transformation versus reaping the benefits has always existed – but has been heightened in the last year. At the heart of it, digital transformation is not just about doing everything faster, but about doing more of the right things in the right way at the right time. And that’s where we’re focused to make an impact with our research.
