Embrace Transformation

From a business perspective, differentiating business processes and quality customer service are central to overall success.

Business leaders must therefore clearly identify and measure how information technology contributes to the value of every key business process.

They must also know how to most cost effectively use IT when the task is merely the management of commodity operations.

Just focusing on infrastructure improvements may result in cost rationalization, but it can also obscure the impact and value of applications and business processes to the end customer.

Quality of service is always an essential ingredient in evaluating the business effectiveness—the elements of which are infrastructure, resources, activities, and services that span the entire business lifecycle.

Business leaders must embrace digital transformation because the right blend of cloud, managed services, and traditional privately run data centers will deliver the following:    

• an ability to leverage economies of scale across the service ecosystem created by using multiple cloud service providers;     
• an understanding of business value that expands the traditional financial values of the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) by including  customer value, seller provider value, broker value, market brand value, corporate value, and the technical value of any investment;    
• a wider view of technology’s impact on a business through the acceptance of a business as a portfolio of business processes that demand the use of portfolio management techniques;
• an understanding of why business processes and their associated IT investments should be classified as differentiating based on IT, differentiating not based on IT, or not differentiating at all.

When viewed from this lens, digital transformation delivers business and mission value by doing these:

• accelerating speed to market,     
• strengthening competitive positioning,     
• boosting revenue growth,     
• raising employee productivity, and     
• expanding the ability to acquire, engage, and retain customers. 

Success, however, requires these:

• envisioning transformation as an economic and business process improvement revolution, not a technical one;      
• relying on metric-driven goals and plans which are explicitly driven by the organization’s goals;     
• ensuring organizational goals are compatible with cloud business enablers; and    
• ensuring enablers support the overall business strategy and align with the available economic options for consuming cloud services.

Interested in reading more about digital transformation and the tools required for success? Pre-order my book, Click to Transform, coming this Saturday!

Article generated by AI in cooperation with Leaders Press based on “Click to Transform”