Digital Transformation is about creating new opportunities for your business to drive innovation and efficiency, to improve how your teams work, and to leapfrog ahead of competitors, all with the goal of delivering new and improved customer experiences.
Every industry is undergoing a transformation. Customers are expecting more and retaining them is increasingly difficult as your competitor is now just a click away. Irrespective of your industry, technology now needs to be front and center of your offering as competition is coming from unexpected sources. Need some real world examples? Thehe world’s largest taxi firm owns no cars; the world’s largest accommodation provider owns no property; and the world’s largest content network owns no content.
Digital transformation is not just desirable anymore, it is a necessity.
Unlocking Success
Digital transformation is reshaping industries by disrupting existing businesses and operating models. The question now isn’t whether to digitally transform or not, it’s how soon can we transform to remain competitive? It’s important to modernize IT to enable digital transformation but building a digital culture across the organization is key. Failing to create the culture risks the success of such initiatives; a whopping 70% of “change programs” don’t achieve stated goals as per McKinsey
How do organizations then unlock success? Based on this research by McKinsey, the success metrics falls into five key categories
- Having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place
- Building capabilities for the workforce of the future
- Empowering people to work in new ways
- Giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade
- Communicating frequently via traditional and digital methods
Path to Transformation
The first phase of digital transformation is identifying the objectives from the digital initiative. With 96% of organizations embarking on digital initiatives as per Gartner digital transformation is now mainstream and top of mind of most CIOs. Based on conversations with thousands of small, medium and large organizations, we’ve identified that organizations embark upon the digital transformation journey to achieve primarily three objectives
Increase operational efficiencies
Efficiency improvements are the primary drivers for organizations to embark on digital transformation with a goal to move from manual, repetitive tasks to automated, integrated solutions that boost operational efficiencies and developer satisfaction.
Deliver better products faster
To tackle and fend off competitors, organizations are leveraging digital transformation to create enhanced customer experiences with a goal of both retaining and acquiring new customers. To achieve this, organizations are looking for ways to move from siloed, non collaborative processes to an integrated process which allows teams to communicate better and avoids waiting and handoffs to deliver products faster to customers.
Reduce security and compliance risks
As per an IDC US DevOps Survey of Large Enterprise Organizations 2019 survey, security/governance have been identified as one of the top 3 pain points for organizations and the top investment area in the next two to three years. The need to decrease security exposure, reduce disruptions due to security and streamline auditing are driving organizations to invest in digital transformation.
Once the drivers have been identified, it is key to ensure you have your eyes on success. Each of these objectives require tangible business results that can be measured to showcase a before and after scenario.
Measuring Success
Most organizations struggle with digital transformation metrics because they are either all over the map or are generic metrics not relevant to the organization. Without identifying the right metrics, the results of a digital transformation are extremely difficult to measure.
Following through on the conversations with organizations on the objectives, we’ve identified a few key business metrics that may be relevant for measuring success based on the objective. Of course, this is not a comprehensive list and needs to be adapted based on the organization’s needs.
Increase operational efficiencies
- Total cost of ownership (license, FTEs, cost of compute) of toolchain
- Cycle time
- Deployment frequency
- Developer turnover
- Employee satisfaction
Deliver better products faster
- Revenue
- Number of customers
- Market Share
- Percentage of releases on time, on-budget releases
- Cycle time; time per stage and waiting time; throughput per developer
- Mean time to resolution (MTTR)
Reduce Security and Compliance Risks
- Percentage of code scanned
- Percentage of critical security vulnerabilities that escaped development
- Audit pass rate; time spent on audits
- Mean time to resolution (MTTR) of security vulnerabilities
