When you think of digital transformation, do you brush it off as a buzzword or marketing gimmick? If that’s the case, it may be because you’ve witnessed the failure of businesses that are unprepared to digitize. Perhaps you’ve even had a bad experience with digital transformation projects within your own industry.
Yet digital transformation stats show businesses that successfully leverage technology to meet today’s IT standard are more agile, more efficient, more profitable, and able to achieve their enterprise goals more rapidly.
How, then, do industry leaders bridge this divide between failure and success in a digitized marketplace? How can we change our perception of digital transformation from buzzword to winning strategy?
True advancement begins with understanding the role data plays in optimizing how you align business and IT strategies, and in better predicting an ever-evolving market. It’s about bridging the digital divide and meeting the expectations of customers, workers, strategists, and other stakeholders
Here are five digital transformation stats that make the case to begin making a change today.
Industries are increasingly disrupted by the introduction of new digital technology, but many businesses remain unprepared for the inevitable
“87% of companies think digital will disrupt their industry, but only 44% are prepared for potential digital disruption,” according to Forbes.
While businesses want to take advantage of the new, powerful technologies of tomorrow, their current IT capabilities lag behind the IT standard of today. This prevents them from being agile. They're a step behind today, but they'll be five steps behind tomorrow.
Digital transformation will allow a company much more agility in predicting and responding to the marketplace. However, preparing to face digital disruption in your industry means a holistic approach to synchronizing enterprise goals and tech strategy, as well as building a company culture that fosters successful digitization for every department.
Successful IT strategies can help ease the advantage bigger companies typically have over small businesses.
An MIT study found that digitally mature companies are 26% more profitable than their less mature peers.
Intentional digital transformation lets small businesses compete with big businesses in new markets and offer a better customer experience. But what exactly does it mean to become digitally mature?
According to the MIT study, achieving digital maturity is twofold. First, companies must invest in initiatives that are technology driven and improve operations. Second, they must transform their leadership capabilities to connect business and IT visions for the company to achieve digital transformation. This way they are able to achieve “a combination of top-down leadership and bottom-up innovation,” the study states.
Evidence suggests that aligning your business and IT strategies outweighs factors such as the size of your workforce. In fact, smaller businesses often see more success in digitization, even in industries that are already tech focused.
Employees at companies with less than 100 employees are nearly three times more likely to say their digital transformation was a success than employees at companies with more than 50,000 employees, reports McKinsey & Company.
Digital transformation looks different for every company, but every business is capable of digital transformation. Digital transformation takes total strategic alignment, from the C-suite to the bottom-rung worker.
Consider the old anecdote about a janitor who worked at NASA. While visiting NASA’s facilities in 1962, President John F. Kennedy asked the janitor what he did for NASA, and the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
The janitor had a specific role to play, but he was as aligned with NASA’s end goal as the astronauts, mission controllers, engineers, and scientists.
When it comes to digital transformation, this alignment is actually easier when there are fewer people. This gives small businesses more incentive than ever to seek new technology initiatives.
Digital maturity can lead to not only better profits, but also reaching your goals more quickly and consistently.
In a recent survey, Deloitte found: The implementation of digital technologies can accelerate progress towards enterprise goals such as financial returns, workforce diversity, and environmental targets by 22%.
Digital transformation helps a business operate better in several dimensions. Deloitte’s study found that those with digital business models can achieve improved efficiency, revenue growth, product or service quality, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and growth and development.
Ultimately, the future demands this more dynamic approach to achieving goals.
Many organizations have begun to see how critical it is to align the strategies of business and technology leaders.
39% of CEOs have placed digital transformation as the top priority for their CIOs, 78% of heads of IT said they are communicating with the board of directors more than ever before, reveals a study on CEO perspectives by BT.
In the past, CEO's haven't really recognized the strategic value that technology can afford. Now they have an appetite for it. However, many CIOs and CTOs are tactics-oriented. They don't have the business acumen or strategic vision to align IT strategy with business strategy.
It takes bringing these visions together to achieve results.
Leadership-minded IT consultants continue to prove invaluable to businesses who must evolve in how they leverage their technology.
At Vudu, our team warrants a seat at the table of your business’s leadership. We have the business acumen, technical expertise, and operational excellence that many IT partners simply lack.
Nobody is better than Vudu at turning data into insights, insights into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. When managed correctly, data can allow you to make better decisions exponentially faster, revolutionize your workflow, and drastically lower the price of your work product.
At Vudu, we are technology wizards who want to bring IT magic to your business and achieve supernatural results. Are you wondering where to start on your own digital transformation? Tell us more about your goals.
