Every organisation has some form of digital transformation strategy in place, which promises to “streamline your operations” or “optimise your business”, and so on. But behind these fluffy catchphrases – what’s the real impact of digital transformation for CIOs in 2020?
A digital transformation strategy will mean many different things to many different organisations. In general, it needs to encompass your technology, people and processes, breaking down your organisational silos and providing agility so you can adapt to future change.
With this in mind, let’s examine the impact of digital transformations for CIOs and where you need to focus your time.
#1 People first
Despite representing a digital change, your human staff and stakeholders will feel the greatest impact of any transformation strategy. So, you must have a clear plan in place to effectively communicate the changes your strategy will have across your entire business.
To achieve this, you need to, first, set clear objectives. Whether you’re transforming an existing business model or overhauling your entire IT infrastructure, you must have a roadmap in place, which is accessible to all.
Second, you must understand the scope of your changes. For example, what areas of the business will be affected by your change plans and how? You need to be clear on how your digital transformation strategy will work at every tier of your organisation to help you get buy-in.
#2 Sharpen your skill set
To drive any digital transformation strategy, CIOs need to take ownership and justify any required changes, not just explain how things will change.
As we’ve just discussed, you will need to do this to different stakeholders and departments, demonstrating how digital technologies and new processes can deliver real value for your organisation.
But, from a technical standpoint, big data is one of the key factors to unlock digital change. As a CIO, you need to understand how to manage and capitalise on the increasing volume, velocity and variety of data any digital initiative will produce, while ensuring the security and compliance of this valuable information.
To drive automation across your digitised processes, you should also understand the basics of AI and machine learning as such tools are increasingly adopted.
You will also need to implement the cloud as a platform for your digital transformation, which provides your organisation with a flexible and cost-effective solution to modernise its IT infrastructure in this way.
However, if you need to migrate your existing tools to the cloud, you don’t want to copy your existing on-premise issues across to the cloud. As such, a migration to the cloud is an opportunity to improve your existing solutions. But it is also a high-risk and multi-stage procedure, where you need to audit your existing infrastructure, create a robust plan and roadmap for your migration, and find and implement the appropriate cloud-based solutions. As such, it is important to surround yourself with cloud specialists to ensure a seamless migration with minimal downtime and disruption for your organisation.
#3 Boost your company’s basic digital literacy
Your staff will need a basic level of digital literacy to use these new technologies in their day-to-day work. However, research reveals more than 40% of workers that use software do have the digital skills required to effectively use them.
So, you need to provide the relevant training to upskill your staff and futureproof your digital transformation strategy.
#4 Get the relevant specialist skills in-house
While a basic level of IT knowledge will be required across your organisation, you also need to get the right technical skills to enable your digital transformation strategy.
Most digital transformations rely on vast swathes of data to enable this change. So, database administration and data analytics are important skill sets to foster in your organisation.
For example, you may want to automate repetitive data collection tasks across your corporate applications. To achieve this, you would need to overhaul your IT infrastructure and consult with real database experts (if possible Microsoft Certified Masters) to develop your new database applications; upgrade your existing applications; and manage and maintain your databases.
Data analysts can also help you gain valuable insights from all that information, helping you make better business decisions.
Once your infrastructure is in place, you’ll also need software developers, security experts and DevOps experts to help you build the best solutions for your business.
Also, when recruiting for these positions, try to find employees that can think creatively, show cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence. As technology replaces many repetitive and manual tasks, these skills are unique to our human intelligence, compared to the skill set of an artificial intelligence machine.
#5 Embrace uncertainty and get lean
Digital change is a widespread phenomenon with 40% of organisations reporting they’re at scale with their digital endeavours. As such, CIOs need to prepare for the changes that digital transformation unleash on the business.
A recent Gartner report states: “How an organization deals — or is prepared to deal — with ‘turns’ and disruption will dictate how that organization succeeds in the future. These turns can take the form of acquisitions, cost pressures, shifts in consumer demand or other challenges, but the reality is that unprepared organizations will sustain permanent damage.”
So, you need to be prepared for such changes and be adaptable in your approach. According to the 2020 CIO Agenda: Winning in the Turns report, only 25% of organisations are “fit” enough to adapt and survive.
The report also identified the following 10 key capabilities that set these organisations apart:
- Providing clear and effective leadership
- Making disciplined IT investment decisions
- Articulating a clear and consistent vision to employees, consumers and partners
- Having a clear and consistent overall business strategy
- Forging a strong CIO and CEO relationship
- Using IT to gain competitive advantage
- Anticipating opportunities and threats to keep themselves ahead of change
- Being willing to take on risks for long-term growth, even If that could decrease current year profits
- Enabling the enterprise to navigate change
- Fostering and changing the culture in IT
What next?
Once you embark on a digital transformation strategy, it never stops. As new metrics and trends emerge, you will need to continually optimise your technology, processes and people to rise above the competition as the world’s digital landscape continues to change.
It can be difficult to keep your finger on the digital pulse. If you’d like help putting your transformation strategy in place, click here to find out more.
