These are the major hurdles CIOs face in their race to embrace digital.
Digital transformation seems to be the flavour of the season with every ICT brand trying to tell you how their offerings will help you transform your infrastructure and business model to succeed in a world where digital is the new currency. But the challenges in bringing about digital transformation go far beyond your legacy infrastructure as it’s all about utilising digital technologies to get deeper customer insights and provide a rich omnichannel customer experience. Here are some of the challenges your organisation needs to deal with during the digital transformation journey.
1. Leadership and vision
Does your organisation have a leadership that understands the fast-changing digital world and the potential of digital technologies to disrupt conventional business models? Do you have the vision to make sense out of humongous amounts of data that digital technologies are capable of generating and driving positive business outcomes? It’s important that you have a leadership that has the vision to embrace and benefit from digital transformation.
2. Legacy IT and approaches
Legacy infrastructure, processes and the thought process that hold legacy together can be major hurdles in your digital transformation journey. Legacy infrastructure binds you to the perimeters of your data centre. How will you go after unstructured data available in the public domain? How will you embrace concepts like cloud and integrate them with your on-premise infrastructure? How will you re-engineer processes to embrace digital? It’s possible for you to retain some amount of legacy and integrate it with new technologies. For that you need an IT roadmap and a governance strategy that intricately ties up legacy to the new technologies and business models.
3. Analytics
In a digitally transformed world, you have to get actionable analytical insights into customer preferences and position your products/services accordingly. Does your organisation have a culture that supports analytics? Are you ready to move from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics or even one step further to prescriptive analytics? Prescriptive analytics will help in faster decision-making allowing you to take advantage of real time information. But for that your data quality needs to be really good.
4. Organisational structure
Your organisational structure has the potential to impede your digital transformation project. As digital transformation is all about deploying new technology and a change in the way you deliver products and services to the customer, a few functions or departments within your organisation may have to be revamped. To make the most out of digital transformation, your organisational structure should be flexible. Consequently, you will need buy-in for such change right from the top.
5. Data security and compliance
The threat scenario is getting complicated with the attacks increasing in both numbers and sophistication. Security, with new technologies like IoT, is an even bigger a concern. With new privacy regulations, in addition to the existing ones, any transformation journey gets complicated and it’s an uphill task for IT teams to keep updated with regulations and also keep data secure.
6. Disruptive businesses
You should have a flexible business model as digital is bringing about a lot of disruption. We have seen that in many cases disruptive businesses have overturned conventional business models on their heads. Agility in responding to change is of utmost importance to compete and survive in a world defined by digital technologies.
Photograph: Geralt/Pixabay
