Why IT struggles with Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is having a key impact on technology, from data-driven decision-making to mobility, cloud adoption, and the explosion in Internet-of-Things (IoT), it has gone beyond than just deploying new solutions.

Organisations should re-examine the established business and keep on working on innovative ideas to drive better business outcomes because the reason enterprises struggle with digital transformation is the use of old digital technologies to fix current issues. Effective transformation requires a collaborative effort of various departments like stakeholders, partners, and customers along with the updated technologies to resolve the emerging concerns within the enterprise.

So digital transformation can happen with the use of digital technologies and data for driving growth. But before, you step into the automation of your processes, it’s important that the entire organisation is able to understand the clear strategy you have planned for the coming years, because it has been cited by Wipro Digital--35% of executives find the lack of clear strategy of digital transformation as one of their key barriers in achieving its full digital potential. The business goals should strictly focus on the insights of a customer, operational efficiencies, market share increment and business agility for achieving successful digitization.

Also, organisations are majorly looking at these 4 technologies for Digital Transformation:

• Machine learning / Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• IoT (Internet Of Things)

• Mobility and connected smart devices

• Cloud computing

Changes can’t be bought without few hindrances or struggle. Hence there are few hurdles that an IT firm struggles with while performing the digital transformation.

Lack of a detailed roadmap

It is very significant for the employees to understand the big picture before performing the digital changes and how their tactical direction can influence the outcomes which is why an organisation should have a detailing of every change performed in the structure. The lack of a proper roadmap leads to many chaos and struggles in the later process. A good plan should always map from vision to strategy to objectives and everyone should know their roles from the scratch because to visualise an actual movement, a direction is always required.

The gap in the skills of employees

While performing the digital transformation, new tasks and responsibilities need to be addressed. Hence it requires up-to-date skill sets including new programmers or software engineers who are specialised in the latest programming languages and product managers who know the customer's perception well. If you will train current employees it would involve time, money and efforts that might require whole organisational restructuring. Alternatively, you can also hire new talent that already has the new skills to come out with the digitization process successfully.

Lack of proper budget

One of the most bothering factors for any organisation is the sufficient amount of funds. Companies are looking for data scientists, artificial intelligence professionals, and devOps engineers for the restructuring but fail to pay the top dollar due to lack of budget. That is also a reason why most of the digital transformation projects fail in IT firms. This clearly means a separate budget with set expectations of how the funding of specific outcomes will be done, is needed.

Security challenges

Security issues are on the rise when organisations pursue digital transformation and go for adopting new technologies. 85% of CISOs (chief information security officer ) said that security issues during the digital transformation can have a “smaller” to “big” impact on business. It is due to the rapid adoption of technologies like IoT and multi-cloud environments--the attack surface with the entryways into a particular network has been increased tremendously.

Also, cyber-attacks are becoming more damaging and sophisticated, regulatory bodies have established more guidelines and rules to protect the consumer data. Hence, organisations are taking care of compliance issues, turn to certified products and people to manage the level of risk.

Thus, setting up the right digital culture for your employees cannot happen within a day or two, it requires a lot of time and endeavors from each employee. It’s more a thinking process than simply digitizing an analog process. Being a good business leader, it is important to impart the end to end knowledge to colleagues or employees about the implementation of a digital plan before performing the transformation.