Digital transformation has been a longstanding priority for CIOs, but it’s evolving in response to changing economic and business dynamics. Recent research highlights a significant shift in digital transformation priorities, with 78 percent of global decision makers adjusting their focus over the past three years.
Today, digital transformation initiatives are aligning more closely with market needs than ever before. To ensure continued success in this dynamic environment, organizations must empower the right stakeholders with the appropriate technologies and overcome common organizational hurdles such as funding gaps and limited executive buy-in.
Balancing Act: Efficiency and Resilience IT has traditionally faced the challenge of balancing cost control and efficiency improvement with the need to maintain business resilience to weather market volatility. The good news is that organizations no longer need to choose between these objectives. Recent findings indicate that 60 percent of IT decision makers prioritize both improving business resilience and efficiency as their top digital transformation goals.
Additionally, 54 percent emphasize the importance of becoming more responsive to changing customer preferences. This dual focus on cost-saving efficiencies and innovation-driven organizational agility is a response to the current economic landscape, allowing IT teams to support the business comprehensively.
Positive Transformative Outcomes Organizations are already seeing positive outcomes from their adjusted digital transformation strategies. All surveyed enterprises report having implemented or identified opportunities for creative digital transformation that were considered unattainable in late 2021. On average, organizations plan to invest $33 million in digital initiatives over the next year.
However, challenges persist, with 100 percent of respondents acknowledging past failures, cancellations, or significant delays in digital transformation projects. On average, 14 percent of IT budgets have been allocated to these projects, resulting in an average loss of over $4 million. Key challenges include data access/management, legacy technology, and organizational obstacles such as limited leadership buy-in, budgetary constraints, and a perception of high failure risk.
The Role of Developers Developers play a pivotal role in digital transformation, creating innovative applications and services that deliver value to internal and external stakeholders. This shift in focus has led enterprises to prioritize “empowering developers” as their top IT investment objective in 2023, surpassing the previous emphasis on “improving application performance” in 2021.
The main drivers for digital transformation this year are pressure from developers to support agile processes and innovation, along with empowering developers to build more applications to meet customer demands. Key technologies required to empower developers include serverless computing, edge computing, IoT, and low/no-code tools. AI technologies offer transformative benefits as well, although only 35 percent of IT teams currently feel pressured to adopt them.
IT’s Role in Empowering the Organization IT departments must strike a balance between the potential benefits of business units procuring and developing services based on these technologies and the need to educate non-tech specialists to prevent costly mistakes. IT’s role is crucial in unlocking the potential of digital modernization, particularly through training and upskilling initiatives.
This approach centers on IT modernization, empowering developers with cloud-based technologies, and supporting each business unit’s IT service development. It maintains a focus on efficiency and resilience while addressing challenges and optimizing digital transformation investments. After years of reactive strategies, IT is poised to become proactive and shine as a driving force for innovation.
