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The Threat Behind Digital Transformation

Jonah Kowall

The age of digital disruption is upon us, as the last decade alone has proven in terms of technology and disruption with the progression of organizations like Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix. We are also on the brink of new disruptions in industry, including banking or payments, insurance, healthcare, construction, packaging, and many more. These not only come from startups disrupting a sector, but companies being able to shift from their existing focus areas to build on new opportunities. They’re driven internally or by creating a new spinoff company into additional areas.

The CxO organization is becoming more concerned with outsiders entering into their markets. In the past, the cost of entry into a new market was significantly higher than it is today. Digital businesses and software-driven business models are changing the playing field, for new entrants to shift into new markets. The cost of experimentation continues to decrease, with lower cost computing models that allow for the rental of resources and software.

Open source plays a key role in both building new applications and creating community leverage; and senior executives are taking notice. IBM’s Global C-Suite Study is a great data set consisting of data collected between January and June 2015. They surveyed 5,247 business leaders from 21 industries in more than 70 countries. The sample comprises 818 CEOs, 643 CFOs, 601 CHROs, 1,805 CIOs, 723 CMOs, and 657 COOs :


Today’s native digital generations prefer to work on digital channels versus in-person channels. This ongoing trend has given rise to improvements in customer service, where interactions are delivered across multiple digital channels, ranging from social channels like Twitter and Facebook to text and voice communications. However, there is still more work to be done to unify these platforms more seamlessly. Technologies such as social, chat, and more recently, bots create the personal touch in a more scalable manner, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. These trends will continually take hold, personalization and fast touch points are valued by today’s users who seemingly have less time than ever before.

The level of patience and complexity involved in making these channels seamless is an increasing challenge with today’s IT complexity. Your customers will not tolerate failure, and expect technology to just work. IBM’s survey data confirms this trend.


This accelerating trend is what will differentiate those businesses who learn to engage in new and differentiated ways across multiple channels. Companies which lead, versus those that follow have very different perspectives on what will likely transpire during a time of disruption.

In Figure 8 below, those indicated as torchbearers see companies who look for another market to expand into being able to enter these markets quickly as innovators in another segment or market. Similarly, these first-mover companies see the need to enter into new or adjacent markets. For this reason you see most companies creating labs or innovation centers. We increasingly see next generation visibility being required for these new and highly agile software systems. This demand is critical for survival, innovation, and growth.

These experiments can only be done promptly when the organization adopts smaller agile teams across the business and technology groups. Breaking up large, and likely slow moving monolithic organizations, software, and systems into smaller units which operate independently. The ability to experimentation and make decisions on their own.

The companies who lead tend to do this far more frequently than those who follow or are laggards. We see this regularly in our customer base, where a large degree of diversity exists in the autonomy within each team. The question remains as to how this will play out with economic changes or political change.


In summary, while this data and analysis confirm many trends, it shows clearly different and increasingly changed thinking as digital becomes the preferred channel for many businesses. The IBM data also informs that decentralized decision making and experimentation are clearly taking hold, but those who lead are in a different place than those who follow. It will be interesting to see how this progresses with IBMs new survey data.

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

The Threat Behind Digital Transformation

Jonah Kowall

The age of digital disruption is upon us, as the last decade alone has proven in terms of technology and disruption with the progression of organizations like Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix. We are also on the brink of new disruptions in industry, including banking or payments, insurance, healthcare, construction, packaging, and many more. These not only come from startups disrupting a sector, but companies being able to shift from their existing focus areas to build on new opportunities. They’re driven internally or by creating a new spinoff company into additional areas.

The CxO organization is becoming more concerned with outsiders entering into their markets. In the past, the cost of entry into a new market was significantly higher than it is today. Digital businesses and software-driven business models are changing the playing field, for new entrants to shift into new markets. The cost of experimentation continues to decrease, with lower cost computing models that allow for the rental of resources and software.

Open source plays a key role in both building new applications and creating community leverage; and senior executives are taking notice. IBM’s Global C-Suite Study is a great data set consisting of data collected between January and June 2015. They surveyed 5,247 business leaders from 21 industries in more than 70 countries. The sample comprises 818 CEOs, 643 CFOs, 601 CHROs, 1,805 CIOs, 723 CMOs, and 657 COOs :


Today’s native digital generations prefer to work on digital channels versus in-person channels. This ongoing trend has given rise to improvements in customer service, where interactions are delivered across multiple digital channels, ranging from social channels like Twitter and Facebook to text and voice communications. However, there is still more work to be done to unify these platforms more seamlessly. Technologies such as social, chat, and more recently, bots create the personal touch in a more scalable manner, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. These trends will continually take hold, personalization and fast touch points are valued by today’s users who seemingly have less time than ever before.

The level of patience and complexity involved in making these channels seamless is an increasing challenge with today’s IT complexity. Your customers will not tolerate failure, and expect technology to just work. IBM’s survey data confirms this trend.


This accelerating trend is what will differentiate those businesses who learn to engage in new and differentiated ways across multiple channels. Companies which lead, versus those that follow have very different perspectives on what will likely transpire during a time of disruption.

In Figure 8 below, those indicated as torchbearers see companies who look for another market to expand into being able to enter these markets quickly as innovators in another segment or market. Similarly, these first-mover companies see the need to enter into new or adjacent markets. For this reason you see most companies creating labs or innovation centers. We increasingly see next generation visibility being required for these new and highly agile software systems. This demand is critical for survival, innovation, and growth.

These experiments can only be done promptly when the organization adopts smaller agile teams across the business and technology groups. Breaking up large, and likely slow moving monolithic organizations, software, and systems into smaller units which operate independently. The ability to experimentation and make decisions on their own.

The companies who lead tend to do this far more frequently than those who follow or are laggards. We see this regularly in our customer base, where a large degree of diversity exists in the autonomy within each team. The question remains as to how this will play out with economic changes or political change.


In summary, while this data and analysis confirm many trends, it shows clearly different and increasingly changed thinking as digital becomes the preferred channel for many businesses. The IBM data also informs that decentralized decision making and experimentation are clearly taking hold, but those who lead are in a different place than those who follow. It will be interesting to see how this progresses with IBMs new survey data.

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...