Olivier Le Moal - Fotolia
IT transformation seen as essential for digital business projects
Businesses that have modernised their IT are in a far better position to make the most of digital transformation initiatives
An increasing number of businesses believe digital transformation is essential to remain competitive and that modernising IT is core to this.
The Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2018 IT transformation maturity study commissioned by Dell EMC and Intel has reported that 81% of survey respondents agree if they do not embrace IT transformation, their organisation will no longer be competitive in their markets, up from 71% in 2017.
Of the 4,000 organisations that participated in the survey, 96% said they have digital transformation initiatives underway – either at the planning stage, at the beginning of implementation, in process, or mature digital transformation.
The study categorised 6% of organisations as legacy, where there has been no IT transformation; 45% were emerging (45%), where they showed progress in modernising their data centres; 43% who were further along in their IT transformation were classified as evolving while 6% said they had completed their IT transformation and were classed as “transformed”.
Respondents whose organisations have achieved transformed status are 16x more likely to have mature digital transformation projects underway versus legacy companies (66% compared with 4%), according to ESG.
Businesses are under increasing pressure to deliver new products quicker. According to ESG, organisations that have been digitally transformed are 22x as likely to be ahead of the competition when bringing new products and services to market.
Transformed companies are 18x more likely to make better and faster data-driven decisions than their competition and are 2x as likely to exceed their revenue goals, the study reported.
Read more about IT transformations
- The digital economy is increasingly defining business, and IT’s relationship to business and the bottom line is becoming tied together more tightly.
- Robotic process automation can replace humans with software bots that are always on and always right, says believer Gerson Benker, but be prepared for major organisational change.
“Companies today need to be agile to stay competitive and drive growth, and IT transformation can be a major enabler of that,” said John McKnight, vice-president of research at Enterprise Strategy Group.
“It’s clear that IT transformation is increasingly resonating with companies and senior executives recognise how it is pivotal to overall business strategy and competitiveness.
“While achieving transformation can be a major endeavour, our research shows ‘transformed’ companies experience real business results, including being more likely to be ahead of the competition in bringing new products and services to market, making better, faster data-driven decisions than their competition, and exceeding their revenue goals.”
Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman of products and operations at Dell Technologies, said: “Organisations realise they have to move quickly to turn data into business intelligence – requiring an end-to-end IT infrastructure that can manage, analyse, store and protect data everywhere it lives.”
