Companies striving to accelerate their digital transformation are finding it more challenging to keep up with the new technologies, platforms, and tools that may—or all too often may not—deliver the expected business outcomes.
That places the onus on digital leaders to constantly evaluate emerging technologies. They also need to understand that even when investment decisions are made, there’s no guarantee they will deliver the desired impact and ROI for the organization—which reflects the fact most digital transformation projects fail to meet their objectives.
CTG’s third annual digital transformation decision-maker report sheds new light on this challenge, highlighting the key technologies digital leaders are prioritizing in the year ahead.
As I view the research findings, it strikes me that these digital priorities say a lot about the business outcomes that enterprises hope to achieve through digital transformation.
The first digital transformation investment priority for leaders this year is cloud migration, indicating an increasing focus on building greater business and technology agility. If you’ve been paying attention the last three years, this agility imperative comes as no surprise!
As technology investments and data migrate to more connected computing resources and infrastructure, however, digital leaders are also more concerned about the growing threat landscape, making cybersecurity the second highest digital investment priority, according to the research.
Rounding out the top three priorities is the need for improved business intelligence, data, and analytics, which tells me that companies are still struggling with data paralysis—vast amounts of data that deliver no insights because the data is siloed, often with quality, structure, and consistency issues.
Data becomes more valuable, of course, when it enables smarter decision making that drives positive business outcomes—and that’s still up to people.
Our research also highlighted this human angle, with digital leaders expressing concerns about retaining both technology and non-tech staff if the employer’s digital strategy is perceived to be immature. That makes it even more vital to prioritize digital investments that deliver tangible impact, including making peoples’ jobs easier.
This also means ensuring that digital investments are supported by IT staff who have been upskilled in cloud computing approaches such as microservices and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), as well as agile and DevSecOps software methodologies, automation, and AI. IT staff also need to improve their communication skills to ensure non-tech workers use these digital accelerators to deliver new value, our research found.
When it comes to priority technology investments, survey responses left no ambiguity: the lingering shortage of specialized IT talent must be solved if companies are going to maximize the impact of their digital transformation projects
- 95% of surveyed decision makers indicate they will need to hire more talent or upskill their current workforce in specific areas of IT in the next 12 months
- 91% plan to outsource tech services, such as cloud migration and cybersecurity, to a third party
Aligning people and processes with digital technology investments is key to accelerating the benefits of any transformation project. Otherwise, a digital initiative can lead to poor customer experiences, lower employee productivity, and even lost revenue opportunities.
Organizations need to continue to invest in new technology and ensure strong alignment between employees with varying levels of tech literacy so everyone understands the business outcomes expected from digital acceleration and each individual’s role in using the technology and achieving digital transformation success.
Our final blog post in this series will provide advice on tangible steps you can take to improve your organization’s digital maturity—the alignment of digital technologies, business processes, and people―to maximize the value created by digital transformation.
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