Gartner survey finds most businesses aren’t prepared for going digital
Technology is transforming the business world, and many are moving towards the digital. According to recent study by Gartner, however, a large selection of businesses, despite claiming to understand the importance of this move, have yet to act on their intentions.
YouGov surveyed 422 business executives from organisations with profits in excess of $1bn and found that organisations were not catching up to digital transformation fast enough. Just 14% report to have fully migrated according to their intended business plan. Almost half (48%) have migrated to some of their intended areas.
For leaders in the C-suite, digital transformation needs to take a top-down approach, which then extends to the rest of the business. The staff need to be re-educated, the right tools need to be brought in, and the transitions needs to be as smooth as possible. The modern CIO is one who understands digital not just as a trend, but as a necessity to move forward and compete.
Once the transformation has begun, the business has to ensure that technology tools are powerful, simple to implement, easy to manage and use, and allow positive change to happen quickly. Otherwise, adoption may be fraught with roadblocks.
In the Gartner study, it was revealed that CEOs, CIOs and IT Managers were the three roles that had “primary responsibility” or oversight of the digital transformation process. Beyond these, roles such as CTO, CFO and other roles were cited, indicating little if any streamlined approaches in businesses. Accepting that the organisational structure of companies differ, it’s possible that the likes of a CEO has the necessary technical knowledge to lead a digital transformation but this is not always the case. It comes down to identifying who is the most qualified to lead the change.
But now we stumble again. If a change is organisation-wide, then surely it’s not a single role that dictates all the moves. Digital transformation requires a culture shift within the organisation, which would necessarily bring in HR managers; it requires extensive training and upskilling to facilitate new types of software, security issues, etc.
Other roadblocks cited by those surveyed include constantly evolving business requirements, integration across data sources, long development cycles for software or other products and the effect technology infrastructure would have on work performance and customer experience.
When implementing new software, businesses will either go for a custom approach, in which they build software from scratch to meet their needs, or use third party software from vendors. Whatever their decision, it comes with its drawbacks. Third party software can be quite rigid with limited benefits. Custom software, on the other hand, can take a long time to make.
Thinking about the definition of digital transformation, a lot comes to mind. Firstly is the question of who needs to be involved versus who should be involved? The C-Suite mentioned above likely need to be involved at some level, but what about for issues like security? Overhauling your security infrastructure is something the entire organisation has to get behind, not just the IT manager. Awareness of and competence with the digital is now a minimum requirement in many businesses – Microsoft Office, Adobe, content management systems, security protocols when dealing with personal data. The frustration for many comes from having to effectively ‘relearn’ a lot of what they could already do by other means to fit with the business model. When new technologies are being brought in, productivity may slow down for that reason. People will not be willing to learn, or will learn slowly.