Businesses considering digital transformation can gain significant performance improvements as long as they choose technologies and approaches that align with business goals.
The changing technology landscape is shaping new business models, empowering companies to work faster and serve customers more efficiently. This shift is powered by a massive digital transformation and supported by unprecedented volumes of data.
Capitalising on these possibilities, organisations are investing heavily in digital models, with industry analysts projecting digital technology spending surpassing $966 billion before end of this decade.*
Given the vast array of technologies available to empower business transformation, it’s especially important for decision-makers to focus investments on areas that will have the biggest impact. With limited capital resources, businesses can usually only accomplish a portion of IT requirements in-house. Freeing internal resources to accelerate innovation can open new avenues for advanced initiatives like cloud, big data, and managed services solutions.
Organisations can reduce IT complexity and, drive real-time scalability, capital costs and faster time-to-market. A focus on advanced data and analytics also puts organisations fully in charge of optimising operations and improving overall customer experiences.
Technology decisions are no longer made by the IT department in isolation: business leaders are taking an active role in choosing solutions. This necessitates better engagement paths for developing and delivering cloud initiatives with non-IT executives. Interactions shouldn’t be geared towards basic education but towards building new capabilities and new advantages through interconnected technology systems.
The success of integrating a digital solution ultimately depends on where organisations choose to focus their limited capital and resources, including what they outsource. By outsourcing some infrastructure needs, businesses can free up resources to focus on creating new kinds of value for customers, and make it easier for employees to work efficiently.
Digital transformation takes many forms and the best programs are tailored to the needs of an individual organisation. They empower individuals to think in new ways about business models, process improvements, and how to translate basic customer needs like service, confidence and satisfaction into a new era.
* https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40978116
Stuart Mills, Regional Director – ANZ, CenturyLink
