Digital transformation is moving higher up the agenda for businesses across all industries. As a result, many organisations are making the shift to digital, integrating new digital technologies and processes to transform the way they operate and do business.
As digital transformation continues to be a priority for businesses, worldwide spending on the technologies and services that enable the digital transformation of business practices, products and organisations is forecast to reach $1.97 trillion in 2022, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). While a lot of businesses already a long way down the road with this process, a large number are still finding it difficult to fully optimise their approach. So, how exactly can businesses optimise their digital approach and who should be heading up the process?
While managing the journey can fall to a number of key players within a business, one of the most common roles involved with the process is the CIO. According to our research, more than one-third (36%) of UK CIOs admit they’re close to completing their journey to digital transformation. Yet, for the majority of businesses, there is still a lot of work to do before they start reaping the rewards that digital transformation can bring to their organisation, including the generation of new revenue streams or enhancing customer engagement.
However, currently, a number of barriers are hampering organisations’ ability to implement the technology needed to reap these rewards. For 38% of respondents too much reliance on legacy systems is among their top barriers to digital transformation. Another 35% and 34% of respondents respectively said that it’s down to their technological infrastructure being too complex and difficulties managing and extracting intelligence from data kept in silos within the organisation is also an obstacle.
Many organisations find that their existing technological architectures are holding them back, making it difficult for them to extract data quickly, analyse it and start using it to advance their core business goals. With companies struggling to get the insight they need from the data quickly enough business agility is being hampered. Businesses must, therefore, make sure they implement technology that helps them overcome this issue and understand what it is they need or want from technology.
According to our research, the ability to manage and extract data and then analyse it in real-time is considered to be integral to a successful strategy. It is, therefore, a significant concern that more than a quarter of CIOs say their organisations are either completely or largely ineffective at using the right data at the right time to drive insight and decision-making. It is vital that businesses address this issue as being able to manage data effectively and analyse it in real time to drive enhanced insight is key to long-term digital transformation success. In order to achieve this, organisations should consider implementing unified data platforms. These platforms can turn data into actionable insights that drive better business decisions and in turn fuel digital transformation itself.
Businesses can’t underestimate the importance and role of data in their digital transformation journey. Ultimately, using data to drive insight is key to the success of digital strategies. Organisations must, therefore, ensure they implement the right technology to enable them to do this, looking not only to their immediate needs but what the business will need in the future. Choosing solutions that will scale as business needs dictate will help them achieve long-term success in this area.
