A Necessary Disruption

Are You Even Digitally Transforming?

Digital Transformation is a post-2010 buzzword. It picked up steam with start-ups and long-established companies attempting it to revolutionize the marketplace radically. But ask ten different Chief Information Officers (CIOs) how they conduct or define digital transformation, and you’re likely to receive ten different answers.

Among those answers, however, exists a commonality – a host of technology projects that attempt to foster change within or outside the parameters of the industry the company operates in. After all, digital transformation is when companies utilize technology to alter the performance or reach of an enterprise by a set, sometimes radical standard.

Consider the broad definition, and CIOs can claim anything between customer-interactive tools such as eCommerce websites or chatbots and mobile-based applications that augment employee productivity as part of their digital transformation strategy. But if you look at it closely enough, you would realize that most of these projects have been around for years.

Then, is digital transformation just another way of describing the modern version of IT?

What Are You Actually Doing, Optimizing?

This is where we unravel the mystery. What several CIOs identify as digital transformation is really not digital transformation, from a definition perspective, at least. Chatbots, standard analytics, mobile-based applications, and other digital services exist merely to bolster existing capabilities.

In a recent Gartner Study, it was revealed that merely 10% of the organizations surveyed were in fact in the process of a digital transformation. The rest are fiercely engaged in various forms of digital business optimization processes – this entails the use of tools to boost productivity, customer experience, and existing revenue streams.

In fact, according to the Gartner 2017 CEO survey, 42% of executives are set to use technologies for digital business optimization, and not digital business transformation. General Electric, for example, is among the 10% to break into the digital business transformation stratosphere – an industrial internet initiative to sell jet turbines or locomotive engines as a software service.

Transformation becomes part of the digital strategy when a company either fears disruption or because it intends to disrupt a pre-existing ecosystem.

So, which category do you fall under then?

James Pagliero
VP – Business Development