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Businesses Face Digital Ceiling in Transformation Progress

Businesses globally face a "digital ceiling" when it comes to digital transformation, according to new research from Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI), the thought leadership and research arm of Infosys. The study reveals that businesses must change their mindsets to achieve sophisticated levels of digital maturity.

Infosys Digital Radar 2020 assessed the digital transformation efforts of companies on a Digital Maturity Index and found year-over-year progress in basic areas, such as digital initiatives to improve a company's efficiency. However, most companies come up against a "digital ceiling" when trying to achieve the most advanced levels of maturity.

The report, which surveyed over 1,000 executives globally, ranked the most digitally advanced companies as "Visionaries", followed by "Explorers" and then "Watchers."

Companies know how to achieve moderate transformation success, with an 18% increase in companies progressing this year from the lowest tier of Watchers to the middle Explorer tier. However, Explorers struggled to move into the top Visionary cluster, with the top tier remaining the same, indicating a "digital ceiling" to transformation efforts.

The Visionary cluster remains unchanged despite companies reporting fewer barriers to digital transformation than last year. Human, rather than technological, barriers are now the most persistent, with the two of the top hurdles being the lack of talent or skills (34%) and a risk-averse corporate culture (35%).

How to Break Through the Digital Ceiling

The research demonstrates that top performers break through the digital ceiling because they think differently.

Firstly, successful companies focus strongly on people, using digital transformation to make improvements centred on customers and employees.

Most companies (68%) across the spectrum stated operational efficiency and increased productivity as a main transformation objective. But successful companies in the Visionary cluster are particularly motivated to make improvements for their employees. Nearly half of Visionaries describe "empowering employees" as a major business objective for transformation, compared with less than one third of Explorers and less than one fifth of Watchers.

Likewise, Visionaries have an increased focus on customer centred initiatives, being significantly more likely than other clusters to undertake transformation to improve customer experiences and engagement and in order to respond more quickly to customer needs.
Secondly, successful companies have a different mindset when it comes to transformation processes.

Traditional linear transformations result in long transformation timelines, meaning a company's improvements are out of date by the time the process is complete. Instead, top performers demonstrate a cyclical mindset, implementing recurring rapid feedback loops to accelerate transformation and keep updates relevant.

The Visionary cluster is far ahead of others in digital initiatives tied to quick cycles: 75% operate at scale in Agile and DevOps, compared with an overall average of 34% for the entire survey group.

Businesses Overestimate Tech Barriers and Underestimate Importance of Company Mndset

The importance of culture and a cyclical transformation mindset to breaking through the digital ceiling were underestimated by businesses last year.

In the 2019 Digital Radar report, companies were asked to predict the biggest barriers to their transformation progress for the following year. This year's Infosys Digital Radar 2020 compares these predictions to the actual challenges businesses faced in 2019.

Businesses reported dramatic declines in the impact that technological barriers have on their transformation progress, including:

■ Inability to experiment quickly (down 49%)

■ Insufficient budget (down 40%)

■ Cybersecurity challenges (down 40%)

However, businesses made much less progress against cultural barriers, including lack of change management capabilities (down 7%) and lack of talent (down 6%).

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Businesses Face Digital Ceiling in Transformation Progress

Businesses globally face a "digital ceiling" when it comes to digital transformation, according to new research from Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI), the thought leadership and research arm of Infosys. The study reveals that businesses must change their mindsets to achieve sophisticated levels of digital maturity.

Infosys Digital Radar 2020 assessed the digital transformation efforts of companies on a Digital Maturity Index and found year-over-year progress in basic areas, such as digital initiatives to improve a company's efficiency. However, most companies come up against a "digital ceiling" when trying to achieve the most advanced levels of maturity.

The report, which surveyed over 1,000 executives globally, ranked the most digitally advanced companies as "Visionaries", followed by "Explorers" and then "Watchers."

Companies know how to achieve moderate transformation success, with an 18% increase in companies progressing this year from the lowest tier of Watchers to the middle Explorer tier. However, Explorers struggled to move into the top Visionary cluster, with the top tier remaining the same, indicating a "digital ceiling" to transformation efforts.

The Visionary cluster remains unchanged despite companies reporting fewer barriers to digital transformation than last year. Human, rather than technological, barriers are now the most persistent, with the two of the top hurdles being the lack of talent or skills (34%) and a risk-averse corporate culture (35%).

How to Break Through the Digital Ceiling

The research demonstrates that top performers break through the digital ceiling because they think differently.

Firstly, successful companies focus strongly on people, using digital transformation to make improvements centred on customers and employees.

Most companies (68%) across the spectrum stated operational efficiency and increased productivity as a main transformation objective. But successful companies in the Visionary cluster are particularly motivated to make improvements for their employees. Nearly half of Visionaries describe "empowering employees" as a major business objective for transformation, compared with less than one third of Explorers and less than one fifth of Watchers.

Likewise, Visionaries have an increased focus on customer centred initiatives, being significantly more likely than other clusters to undertake transformation to improve customer experiences and engagement and in order to respond more quickly to customer needs.
Secondly, successful companies have a different mindset when it comes to transformation processes.

Traditional linear transformations result in long transformation timelines, meaning a company's improvements are out of date by the time the process is complete. Instead, top performers demonstrate a cyclical mindset, implementing recurring rapid feedback loops to accelerate transformation and keep updates relevant.

The Visionary cluster is far ahead of others in digital initiatives tied to quick cycles: 75% operate at scale in Agile and DevOps, compared with an overall average of 34% for the entire survey group.

Businesses Overestimate Tech Barriers and Underestimate Importance of Company Mndset

The importance of culture and a cyclical transformation mindset to breaking through the digital ceiling were underestimated by businesses last year.

In the 2019 Digital Radar report, companies were asked to predict the biggest barriers to their transformation progress for the following year. This year's Infosys Digital Radar 2020 compares these predictions to the actual challenges businesses faced in 2019.

Businesses reported dramatic declines in the impact that technological barriers have on their transformation progress, including:

■ Inability to experiment quickly (down 49%)

■ Insufficient budget (down 40%)

■ Cybersecurity challenges (down 40%)

However, businesses made much less progress against cultural barriers, including lack of change management capabilities (down 7%) and lack of talent (down 6%).

The Latest

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...