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Digital Transformation - Here for the Long Haul

Sydney Sloan

Once a catch-all buzzword, "digital transformation" is now an impossible-to-ignore strategic underpinning of leading businesses. In fact, APMdigest made digital transformation a "hot topic" for 2017, recognizing that its importance will continue to grow as more and more organizations embrace it.

A relevant research piece about digital transformation was recently released by Alfresco Software, The Great Rethink: How Digital Leaders Are Building Tomorrow's Organizations. The report is based on comprehensive interviews of more than 300 senior executives at companies with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion, and it identifies common characteristics of high-performance organizations as they seek to establish themselves as digital disruptors in their individual markets.

Alfresco's research aims to "separate the winners from the losers," concluding that three key levers are typically employed by business and IT leaders when determining the best way to leverage technology to drive successful digital transformation:

Design thinking — leveraging a relentless focus on optimizing user experience and customer experience to guide all business technology decisions

Open thinking — encouraging innovation from both inside and outside the organization to drive new initiatives

Platform thinking — building an ecosystem of partners and customers that exchange capabilities and data to create added value through systems and solution deployment

Alfresco's research notes that the path to digital success is best realized by activating all three of these levers simultaneously.

64 percent of the report's "best-in-class" firms, those that excel across all three categories, report significant annual growth (defined by exceeding 10 percent EBITDA growth over the past three years) versus 43 percent of those still developing their capabilities across one or two of the three key areas.

Leadership Is Key

The research determines that CEOs must lead corporate digital transformation, with close to half (49 percent) of the fast-growing companies' digital transformation efforts being led directly by the CEO, versus 20 percent for all others. Digital transformation starts at the top, ideally with the CEO driving change and ensuring that the whole company is moving in the right direction.

According to Alfresco, fast-growing companies also excel at customer- and user-first thinking, with 85 percent currently having dedicated user experience teams. In addition, they commit to an open approach to the flow of ideas and concepts in their organizations, with 85 percent saying a commitment to open standards is "important or very important."

Finally, high-performing companies re-imagine their business models to incorporate support for a shared economy and platform thinking; in fact, 67 percent of these companies plan to significantly increase the capability for customers and/or suppliers to connect to them in the next three years.

The report confirms that digital transformation has truly taken hold in the corporate world and illustrates that today's digital economy is a case of "disrupt or be disrupted." The financial performance of leading firms bears this out. Digital transformation is not just a critical stepping stone to success – it can be the key to an organization's very survival.

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Digital Transformation - Here for the Long Haul

Sydney Sloan

Once a catch-all buzzword, "digital transformation" is now an impossible-to-ignore strategic underpinning of leading businesses. In fact, APMdigest made digital transformation a "hot topic" for 2017, recognizing that its importance will continue to grow as more and more organizations embrace it.

A relevant research piece about digital transformation was recently released by Alfresco Software, The Great Rethink: How Digital Leaders Are Building Tomorrow's Organizations. The report is based on comprehensive interviews of more than 300 senior executives at companies with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion, and it identifies common characteristics of high-performance organizations as they seek to establish themselves as digital disruptors in their individual markets.

Alfresco's research aims to "separate the winners from the losers," concluding that three key levers are typically employed by business and IT leaders when determining the best way to leverage technology to drive successful digital transformation:

Design thinking — leveraging a relentless focus on optimizing user experience and customer experience to guide all business technology decisions

Open thinking — encouraging innovation from both inside and outside the organization to drive new initiatives

Platform thinking — building an ecosystem of partners and customers that exchange capabilities and data to create added value through systems and solution deployment

Alfresco's research notes that the path to digital success is best realized by activating all three of these levers simultaneously.

64 percent of the report's "best-in-class" firms, those that excel across all three categories, report significant annual growth (defined by exceeding 10 percent EBITDA growth over the past three years) versus 43 percent of those still developing their capabilities across one or two of the three key areas.

Leadership Is Key

The research determines that CEOs must lead corporate digital transformation, with close to half (49 percent) of the fast-growing companies' digital transformation efforts being led directly by the CEO, versus 20 percent for all others. Digital transformation starts at the top, ideally with the CEO driving change and ensuring that the whole company is moving in the right direction.

According to Alfresco, fast-growing companies also excel at customer- and user-first thinking, with 85 percent currently having dedicated user experience teams. In addition, they commit to an open approach to the flow of ideas and concepts in their organizations, with 85 percent saying a commitment to open standards is "important or very important."

Finally, high-performing companies re-imagine their business models to incorporate support for a shared economy and platform thinking; in fact, 67 percent of these companies plan to significantly increase the capability for customers and/or suppliers to connect to them in the next three years.

The report confirms that digital transformation has truly taken hold in the corporate world and illustrates that today's digital economy is a case of "disrupt or be disrupted." The financial performance of leading firms bears this out. Digital transformation is not just a critical stepping stone to success – it can be the key to an organization's very survival.

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 ...