Latest digital transformation publications

Organizations that strive to be customer-obsessed must undergo a digital transformation and use technology to drive superior customer experiences externally, powered by efficient and responsive internal operations. A foundation of systems, processes, and investments drives ongoing innovation and supports your organization’s digital transformation. Key elements of the foundation are in enterprise applications, that is, systems of record, that support internal operations.

The dynamics of business today are tough and getting tougher. In 1965, the average company on the S&P 500 could expect a 33-year tenure on the index. By 2026, that’s expected to be 14 years. Or, looked at from another angle, about 250 of the 500 will be gone inside 10 years. The Kodaks, Blockbusters, and Yahoos disappear and are replaced, for a while at least, by the generation of Zoom and the makers of Snapchat and TikTok. Innosight, the company from which I borrow the above scary numbers, calls this Creative Destruction. Your nemesis comes from richly funded startups or internet royalty such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Google. It’s as likely to come from China or India as the US or Europe. Companies rise and fall faster than Icarus and tomorrow’s largest company in the world is the company you haven’t heard of today. To compete, companies must iterate and constantly reinvent themselves.

In the last decade, few organisations would argue with the necessity of digital transformation; unfortunately, almost everyone would argue about what exactly “digital transformation” means. Now that many organisations are several years into their digital transformation efforts, that lack of definition has become a problem, in part because we’ve gotten to a moment where many leaders are curious about the ROI of their digital transformation initiatives – and rightly so. No major project should be undertaken without a clear sense of how to measure its ROI. It is, however, impossible to calculate ROI without an agreed-upon definition and a tangible, consistent goal. That may sound basic, but a lot of organisations launch digital transformation initiatives without agreeing on those two things. Here’s how to think about ROI if that’s the boat your organization finds itself in.

The biggest challenge across all industries is that most organisations are treating digital transformation as a loose correlation of technology projects. But, digital transformation is more than a project, it’s a re-writing of the business which requires significant cultural change.

While disconnected, siloed working doesn’t always lead to explosive Martian mishaps, it is certainly increasingly incompatible with our hyper-connected, digitally transformed realities. Innovation and progress have the best chance to succeed when inter-team alignment is constant, and everyone is relentlessly, continually engaged in collaborative dialogue. This is exactly why DevOps methodologies are having such an influential impact on software development right now, bringing development and operations teams together to produce the best possible outcomes. Much has been written about the technical aspects of DevOps but, regrettably, less attention has been spent on championing the fundamental soft skills that make it so powerful.