IT business transformation can revolutionize your business and get you ready for an exciting future. We’ll answer your questions about what this digital transformation is, what it involves, how to get started, and what to expect.
Let’s get into it.
What is IT Business Transformation?
IT business transformation is the process of assessing, upgrading, and transforming your entire IT infrastructure to prepare your business for the future. The exact form your transformation takes will depend on your medium- and long-term business strategy, the marketplaces you want to expand into, and the products and services you create.
What is the Purpose of IT Business Transformation?
Typically, businesses upgrade and improve their technology to become more agile, competitive, and fast-to-market. This is especially important in a digital economy as agile development and consumer demands must be supported by flexible infrastructure that enhances technological and business capabilities.
What Technology Areas are Impacted by IT Business Transformation?
Transforming your IT infrastructure can be as wide-ranging as you need it to be. Typically, transformation will involve your IT architecture, networks, data centers, servers, applications, and data. You will also need to refine the people and processes that integrate with the technology, including IT service management, DevOps, and other IT operations.
What Are the Benefits of IT Business Transformation?
There’s a strong case to be made for enhancing infrastructure and technology, including:
- Easier integration between applications, infrastructure, data, and third parties.
- Shorter development life cycles resulting in faster innovation.
- Automation allowing for automatic processes, increased efficiencies, streamlining, and less waste.
- Flexible infrastructure that can meet business, employee, and customer demands without compromising availability or responsiveness.
- Greater support of a mobile-enabled enterprise and workforce as customers and employees interact through mobile devices.
- Reduced costs through moving to an on-demand resource model, with much lower capital expenditure and up front costs.
What Are the Main Steps Involved with IT Business Transformation?
Typically, IT business transformation will involve the following:
- A strategic decision that transformation is necessary and desirable, including a clear vision of the end state once transformation has taken place.
- Creation of program and project teams that will manage the transformation throughout the entire process.
- An audit of the existing IT environment to establish what parts of the ecosystem need to be transformed, together with mapping that environment onto applications, processes, and operations.
- The creation of a new IT environment, often in a public or private cloud.
- Moving infrastructure, applications, data, and other IT elements from the old environment to the new.
- Testing of IT elements in the new environment, prior to switching over.
- Ongoing support, maintenance, and continual improvement.
You can find out more information in our guide.
What Are the Main Challenges of IT Business Transformation?
There are several major challenges that will need to be overcome for a successful digital transformation, these include:
- Getting stakeholder buy in — a transformation project can be large and resource-intensive. It is vital to explain the benefits of IT transformation so that stakeholders are supportive of the project.
- Changing the culture — employees can be very resistant to change. You will need to ensure active communications around the benefits of transformation and how it positions the business and its workforce for greater success.
- Understanding the current environment — the IT environment is typically very complex. It’s critical to have an excellent understanding of all the business, IT, and data interdependencies in every part of the ecosystem. This will allow you to move key functionality without impacting the business or customers.
- Dealing with legacy IT elements — some older infrastructure, applications, and integrations may not be ready for transformation. These must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis to minimize disruption.
If you’re getting ready for IT business transformation, contact us. We can guide you through the necessary steps and provide consulting and support on every aspect of moving towards a flexible, scalable, and responsive cloud IT environment.