6 Indicators of a Successful Digital Transformation
March 04, 2020
Share this

Most (93%) enterprises are undergoing some kind of digital transformation driven primarily by a desire to cut costs (77%) and improve customer experience (71%), according to the State of Enterprise Digital Transformation survey conducted by Hanover Research and commissioned by AHEAD.

Yet of those surveyed, almost half (42%) are struggling to achieve success as they fall behind schedule or their efforts stall altogether.

The survey revealed the most common and difficult challenges of enterprise digital transformations are legacy systems (36%) and technical debt (24%). As such, 67% of respondents cited infrastructure as a big part of their digital transformation strategy.

An analysis of the survey results revealed six factors that correlate with digital transformation success.

1. Dedicated Leadership

The survey found that 83% of digital transformations that are on track or ahead of schedule are led by a CIO, CEO, CDO, or CTO. As digital transformation touches every part of an enterprise, company-wide buy-in is critical.

2. All-In Approach

Transformations that are on track are 30% more likely to be structured as full-scale change initiatives.

Because digital operations are often so interconnected, piecemeal and partial transformations can often be siloed and result in limited impact on the factors driving the transformation.

3. Defined Digital Roadmap

92% of transformations that are on target or ahead of schedule have a defined strategy and roadmap that includes IT infrastructure and operations.

4. Alignment Between Infrastructure and Apps

Enterprises powered by an integrated DevOps approach are 43% more likely to see success in digital transformation efforts. To avoid bottlenecks, enterprises should audit DevOps functions before undergoing digital transformation.

5. Platform Mindset

Businesses that include IT infrastructure as a big part of their digital transformation are 36% more likely to have a successful transformation. As the backbone of a digital change initiative, an enterprise's infrastructure determines how far the transformation will go and its limits.

6. Commitment to Intelligent Operations

Companies that monitor IT performance in real time and remediate issues quickly are 24% more likely to undergo a successful digital transformation

Companies that monitor IT performance in real time and remediate issues quickly are 24% more likely to undergo a successful digital transformation. Further, the survey found that enterprises are more likely to see success in digital transformation if they have confidence in their abilities to perform highly in areas of automation, monitoring, hybrid cloud models and integrated security.

Tom Pohlmann, Head of Customer Success and Marketing at AHEAD, concluded: "Transformations are complex and often involve conflicting objectives like cost cutting alongside customer experience improvements. Without a strong foundation on which to build, run and innovate, transformation efforts will fail."

Share this

The Latest

June 01, 2023

The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...

May 31, 2023

Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...

May 30, 2023

Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...

May 25, 2023

Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...

May 24, 2023

As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...

May 23, 2023

Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...

May 22, 2023

Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...

May 18, 2023

Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...

May 17, 2023

When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...

May 16, 2023

Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...