Gartner: 6 Barriers to Becoming a Digital Business
July 27, 2018
Share this

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation, they are finding that digital business is not as simple as buying the latest technology — it requires significant changes to culture and systems. A recent Gartner, Inc. survey found that only a small number of organizations have been able to successfully scale their digital initiatives beyond the experimentation and piloting stages.

"The reality is that digital business demands different skills, working practices, organizational models and even cultures," said Marcus Blosch, Research VP at Gartner. "To change an organization designed for a structured, ordered, process-oriented world to one designed for ecosystems, adaptation, learning and experimentation is hard. Some organizations will navigate that change, and others that can't change will become outdated and be replaced."

Gartner has identified six barriers that CIOs must overcome to transform their organization into a digital business:

Barrier No. 1: A Change-Resisting Culture

Digital innovation can be successful only in a culture of collaboration. People have to be able to work across boundaries and explore new ideas. In reality, most organizations are stuck in a culture of change-resistant silos and hierarchies.

"Culture is organizational 'dark matter' — you can't see it, but its effects are obvious," said Blosch. "The challenge is that many organizations have developed a culture of hierarchy and clear boundaries between areas of responsibilities. Digital innovation requires the opposite: collaborative cross-functional and self-directed teams that are not afraid of uncertain outcomes."

CIOs aiming to establish a digital culture should start small: Define a digital mindset, assemble a digital innovation team, and shield it from the rest of the organization to let the new culture develop. Connections between the digital innovation and core teams can then be used to scale new ideas and spread the culture.

Barrier No. 2: Limited Sharing and Collaboration

The lack of willingness to share and collaborate is a challenge not only at the ecosystem level but also inside the organization. Issues of ownership and control of processes, information and systems make people reluctant to share their knowledge. Digital innovation with its collaborative cross-functional teams is often very different from what employees are used to with regards to functions and hierarchies — resistance is inevitable.

"It's not necessary to have everyone on board in the early stages. Try to find areas where interests overlap, and create a starting point. Build a first version, test the idea and use the success story to gain the momentum needed for the next step," said Blosch.

Barrier No. 3: The Business Isn't Ready

Many business leaders are caught up in the hype around digital business. But when the CIO or CDO wants to start the transformation process, it turns out that the business doesn't have the skills or resources needed.

"CIOs should address the digital readiness of the organization to get an understanding of both business and IT readiness," Blosch advised. "Then, focus on the early adopters with the willingness and openness to change and leverage digital. But keep in mind that digital may just not be relevant to certain parts of the organization."

Barrier No. 4: The Talent Gap

Most organizations follow a traditional pattern — organized into functions such as IT, sales and supply chain and largely focused on operations. Change can be slow in this kind of environment.

Digital innovation requires an organization to adopt a different approach. People, processes and technology blend to create new business models and services. Employees need new skills focused on innovation, change and creativity along with the new technologies themselves, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

"There are two approaches to breach the talent gap — upskill and bimodal," said Blosch. "In smaller or more innovative organizations, it is possible to redefine individuals' roles to include more skills and competencies needed to support digital. In other organizations, using a bimodal approach makes sense by creating a separate group to handle innovation with the requisite skill set."

Barrier No. 5: The Current Practices Don't Support the Talent

Having the right talent is essential, and having the right practices lets the talent work effectively. Highly structured and slow traditional processes don't work for digital. There are no tried and tested models to implement, but every organization has to find the practices that suits it best.

"Some organizations may shift to a product management-based approach for digital innovations because it allows for multiple iterations. Operational innovations can follow the usual approaches until the digital team is skilled and experienced enough to extend its reach and share the learned practices with the organization," Blosch explained.

Barrier No. 6: Change Isn't Easy

It's often technically challenging and expensive to make digital work. Developing platforms, changing the organizational structure, creating an ecosystem of partners — all of this costs time, resources and money.

Over the long term, enterprises should build the organizational capabilities that make change simpler and faster. To do that, they should develop a platform-based strategy that supports continuous change and design principles and then innovate on top of that platform, allowing new services to draw from the platform and its core services.

Share this

The Latest

November 28, 2023

Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...

November 27, 2023

Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...

November 22, 2023

Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...

November 21, 2023

Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...

November 20, 2023

This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...

November 16, 2023

As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...

November 15, 2023

In the same way a city is a sum of its districts and neighborhoods, complex IT systems are made of many components that continually interact. Observability requires a comprehensive and connected view of all aspects of the system, including even some that don't directly relate to its technological innards ...

November 14, 2023

Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy ...

November 13, 2023

In today's rapidly evolving business environment, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are grappling with the challenge of regaining control over their IT roadmap. The constant evolution and introduction of new technology releases, combined with the pressure to deliver innovation on shrinking budgets, has added layers of complexity for executives who must transform the perception of the role of the IT leader from cost managers and maintainers to strategic enablers of growth and profitability ...

November 09, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has saturated the conversation around technology as compelling new tools like ChatGPT produce headlines every day. Enterprise leaders have correctly identified the potential of AI — and its many tributary technologies — to generate new efficiencies at scale, particularly in the cloud era. But as we now know, these technologies are rarely plug-and-play, for reasons both technical and human ...