“
FINAL WORD
BEFORE YOU START MAKING
TECHNOLOGY CHOICES, CONSIDER
YOUR CURRENT IT ESTATE CAREFULLY
AND MAP OUT BOTH CURRENT AND
IDEAL FUTURE STATES FOR CORE
INFRASTRUCTURE AND APPLICATIONS.
organisation specific. International Data
Corporation (IDC) has created a helpful
digital scorecard for CIOs thinking about
how to best fashion their KPIs.
With shared understanding as a goal,
your metrics need to interest and engage
your organisation’s leadership team. They
also need to reflect the fact that Digital
Transformation is a long-term programme.
Find the right partners
to have the ‘digital savvy’ leaders, but they
also need to build relevant talent and skill-
sets throughout their organisations.
Looking at the bigger picture also requires
a willingness to learn lessons from those
who report success, to ensure that Digital
Transformations do not ‘fall short in
improving performance and equipping
companies to sustain changes’. This has
happened to many a digital project as, for
example, an organisation has been unable
to sufficiently update entrenched, analogue
business processes to support a whizzy new
digital customer interface.
Understand your broader
business environment
Businesses need to identify external
pressures and challenges covering key areas
such as their markets, processes, regulatory
environment, competition and supplier
and customer ecosystems. Time and effort
should be put into researching where to
invest and how Digital Transformation
strategies are being applied in relevant
businesses and industries.
This underlines the need to focus Digital
Transformation more broadly than tech
procurement because, as Gartner argues, ‘the
non-technological aspects, if not addressed,
can mask the depth of organisational
transformation required and become serious
inhibitors.’ Industry inertia, for example, can
lead to the failure of Digital Transformation
projects. You might have a shiny new
customer-facing process, but if it relies on a
partner who can’t support digitally transacting
in this way, it will never achieve its promise.
Consider your technology options
Often IT departments don’t have the
skillset or time to develop a comprehensive
86
INTELLIGENTCIO
roadmap for change and transformation.
Add to this the bewildering choice of
technology providers out there pushing
the Digital Transformation message
and the resulting complexity of a Digital
Transformation project ‘can be a killer’.
Before you start making technology
choices, consider your current IT estate
carefully and map out both current and
ideal future states for core infrastructure
and applications. There are important
decisions to be made about legacy business
applications and this map will help you to
research the options for modernisation.
There is a lot of noise in the industry about
being ‘cloud-first’ and for many, the idea
is to plan for everything eventually being in
the cloud. However, it’s worth noting that it
is not the only option for legacy applications
and some of the first movers into the cloud
have not seen the cost and performance
benefits they planned for.
Set performance measures
Few, if any, organisations will be able to make
the Digital Transformation journey alone, so
tech partnerships can ensure your approach
is future-proof and flexible to adapt with
changing demand and technology. Look for
partners who, in Forrester’s words, can ‘define
Digital Transformation’.
The right partners should be able to
demonstrate an understanding of your
business, markets, competitive pressures and
opportunities. When you’ve started narrowing
down your options, ask for evidence that they
can successfully apply technology to deliver
genuine transformative change.
Otherwise, you risk missing the target by
simply moving from one set of technology
vendors and service providers to another,
without addressing your wider objectives.
Digital Transformation brings with it a broad
spectrum of risk and reward. Wherever you
are on the journey, if you’re establishing and
evaluating objectives, progress, challenges
and benefits, it can pay huge dividends. n
KPIs offer IT leaders the chance to
set a shared understanding of Digital
Transformation within the business and
maintain an ongoing dialogue. The
temptation is to evolve existing IT-focused
metrics, but with an objective as broad as
business transformation there is a good case
for starting again.
Consider what it means to your organisation
to be a digital business; can you demonstrate
and measure the impact on customers,
speed of operations, data exploitation and
the rate of innovation?
There are many Digital Transformation
KPI lists available on the Internet, but this
is another temptation best avoided. Your
KPIs need to be both industry specific and
Tom Needs, COO, Node4
www.intelligentcio.com