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D
igital Transformation is everywhere. It
heralds a new era of business agility
and innovation-fuelled growth –
catapulting the role of the CIO into a major
boardroom player. However, this also means
that IT leaders are under more pressure
than ever before for their teams to support
business demands for continuous innovation
– delivering services faster, cheaper and often
with fewer staff. Transitioning into a digitally-
empowered business is at the top of many
C-Suites’ priority lists and according to a 2018
IDC report, 89% of enterprises have plans
to or have already adopted a ‘digital-first
business strategy’.
Thus, it is no surprise that the global Digital
Transformation market is growing at a CAGR
of over 18% and according to MarketWatch,
is estimated to exceed US$462 billion by
2024. But success is proving difficult to
achieve. Half of the US executives surveyed
in one 2017 poll said that their company
isn’t successfully executing against 50% of
their Digital Transformation strategies. One
in five said they secretly believe it’s a waste
of time. This is also supported in numerous
other sources. In fact, a report from analyst
firm, IDC, also warns that while spending is
increasing, firms aren’t getting the results
they crave. Over half (59%) of organisations
questioned for the report were described
as being stuck in the early stages of Digital
Transformation maturity, what IDC calls a
‘digital impasse’.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. A few
notable organisations are seen as good
examples of successful digital companies, in
particular, modern and disruptive ‘challenger
banks’ such as Monzo and Starling Bank have
led the way by placing digital at the very heart
of their operations. These businesses are
able to innovate at an extreme pace, placing
more traditional companies one step behind.
However, challenger banks are unique in
the fact that they did not inherit any legacy
technology as they were born during the digital
age and thus were able to implement the
services expected within a traditional banking
experience while utilising modern technology.
Legacy and complexity compounds
the need for visibility
Organisations that struggle to implement
a successful Digital Transformation project
all have one problem in common: behind
www.intelligentcio.com
Mike Walton, CEO and Founder at Opsview
a new breed of innovative customer and
employee-facing digital services lies a
hotchpotch of disparate and decentralised
system – virtual machines, hybrid cloud
accounts, IoT endpoints, physical and
virtual networks and much more. These
disparate, decentralised systems don’t talk
to each other and they frequently fail. To
make things worse, many of these systems
are outside of the control of IT, adding an
extra layer of opacity and complexity.
With so much at stake, the only way to
mitigate against the risk of business failure
is for CIOs to ensure that its IT team
centralises IT monitoring and destroys data
islands to gain a holistic view of what is
going on across the business. By monitoring
all aspects of applications and systems
from a single pane of glass, the CIO can
ensure that the business has the full picture
of system health, availability and capacity
at all times in near real-time and that IT
is able to drive business value from Digital
Transformation operations.
Furthermore, without visibility into the
performance of applications and systems,
early-stage problems can be missed
which then end up snowballing into major
incidents, such as IT outages. These types of
incidents have a huge financial impact and
every minute a business is suffering from
an IT outage it haemorrhages money – in
fact, it costs about US$5,600 per minute
according to Gartner’s research, although
the analyst admits that the figure could
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