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Digital Transformation and IT Transformation: The Questions Behind the Conundrum

Dennis Drogseth

EMA has just completed some new research on "Digital" and "IT Transformation." Our goal was to discover what the truth really is surrounding these critical (and sometimes overused) terms. In order to optimize the depth and value of this unique research, for the first time ever EMA partnered with the IT Transformation Institute.

We will be delivering a webinar sharing some of the highlights of this research on September 30.

We embedded a simple definition within our questionnaire, just to make sure our respondents were on the same "proverbial" page. So we defined "digital transformation" as directed at optimizing business or organizational effectiveness via digital and IT services. And "IT transformation" as an initiative focused on optimizing IT performance for business or organizational needs and outcomes. While the two terms do seem like hand-and-glove fits (and should be), the recent buzz around digital transformation has set it apart in the minds of many.

We looked globally across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific (APAC) with more than 300 respondents, about 30% of whom were business leaders and the rest largely came from the IT executive community. We wanted to investigate how digital and IT transformation complemented each other (or didn't), how business leaders and IT leaders viewed this critical arena — where were the views similar and where did they differ? And we wanted to investigate geographic differences, as well.

In turn, we wanted to project this "transformational heat map" on what we believed to be a number of transformational prerequisites. These included:

■ Organization and politics: Who's leading the charge in digital transformation? In IT transformation? We asked both in terms of role and organizational association, and in terms of both drivers and ongoing oversight.

■ Technologies: Were technology investments drivers, supporting players, or non-central to transformation? We examined this question in detail from operations to ITSM; from analytics to automation to service mapping; from customer experience, to security, to financial and IT governance; from revenue generation and brand awareness to business process impacts.

■ Metrics: How did both IT and digital transformation efforts measure success? What were the predominant preferred metrics in terms of operational performance, financial optimization and business outcomes?

■ Cloud and DevOps: How are these ground-shaping foundations of the digital age affecting digital and IT transformation? How and where are they integrated into transformational efforts?

■ Processes and Best Practices: To what degree do industry best practices apply to transformational efforts? And what are the preferred best practices for digital transformation in particular?

■ Transformational Partners: Where are transformational leaders seeking to partner and how successful are those partnerships, whether from IT management software vendors, systems integrators, business consultants, or transformational specialists?

■ Success Factors: What is the magic formula (in terms of all of the above and more) for transformational success? Is it the same for IT and for digital transformation? And how do business stakeholders and IT stakeholders view success rates, obstacles, and priorities for going forward?

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Digital Transformation and IT Transformation: The Questions Behind the Conundrum

Dennis Drogseth

EMA has just completed some new research on "Digital" and "IT Transformation." Our goal was to discover what the truth really is surrounding these critical (and sometimes overused) terms. In order to optimize the depth and value of this unique research, for the first time ever EMA partnered with the IT Transformation Institute.

We will be delivering a webinar sharing some of the highlights of this research on September 30.

We embedded a simple definition within our questionnaire, just to make sure our respondents were on the same "proverbial" page. So we defined "digital transformation" as directed at optimizing business or organizational effectiveness via digital and IT services. And "IT transformation" as an initiative focused on optimizing IT performance for business or organizational needs and outcomes. While the two terms do seem like hand-and-glove fits (and should be), the recent buzz around digital transformation has set it apart in the minds of many.

We looked globally across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific (APAC) with more than 300 respondents, about 30% of whom were business leaders and the rest largely came from the IT executive community. We wanted to investigate how digital and IT transformation complemented each other (or didn't), how business leaders and IT leaders viewed this critical arena — where were the views similar and where did they differ? And we wanted to investigate geographic differences, as well.

In turn, we wanted to project this "transformational heat map" on what we believed to be a number of transformational prerequisites. These included:

■ Organization and politics: Who's leading the charge in digital transformation? In IT transformation? We asked both in terms of role and organizational association, and in terms of both drivers and ongoing oversight.

■ Technologies: Were technology investments drivers, supporting players, or non-central to transformation? We examined this question in detail from operations to ITSM; from analytics to automation to service mapping; from customer experience, to security, to financial and IT governance; from revenue generation and brand awareness to business process impacts.

■ Metrics: How did both IT and digital transformation efforts measure success? What were the predominant preferred metrics in terms of operational performance, financial optimization and business outcomes?

■ Cloud and DevOps: How are these ground-shaping foundations of the digital age affecting digital and IT transformation? How and where are they integrated into transformational efforts?

■ Processes and Best Practices: To what degree do industry best practices apply to transformational efforts? And what are the preferred best practices for digital transformation in particular?

■ Transformational Partners: Where are transformational leaders seeking to partner and how successful are those partnerships, whether from IT management software vendors, systems integrators, business consultants, or transformational specialists?

■ Success Factors: What is the magic formula (in terms of all of the above and more) for transformational success? Is it the same for IT and for digital transformation? And how do business stakeholders and IT stakeholders view success rates, obstacles, and priorities for going forward?

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...