Digital transformation may not be good for long-term success

Digital transformation is sometimes seen as a panacea, providing visibility into the planning process, aligning software development with the business and delivering better outcomes.

But in a new study from Digital.ai more than half of businesses report issues providing that visibility and alignment, which calls into question long term success of today’s digital transformation initiatives.

The survey of 600 people, split evenly between IT decision makers, security decisions makers and business executives, shows 99 percent agree that organizations need visibility into business planning processes to produce better outcomes. But only 62 percent say they can provide that visibility and 34 percent admit they are doing poorly at providing visibility.

In addition 94 percent of respondents believe organizations need software development and delivery to be better linked with business objectives, but only 54 percent say their business, IT, and security teams are strategically aligned and working toward the same goals and objectives. What’s more, 78 percent say COVID-19 has further impacted the alignment between business and IT value streams in their organizations.

"Most of today's Agile and DevOps tools are designed for the workgroup, making visibility and alignment fairly easy to achieve at the team level. However, scaling to the enterprise is far more complex, as organizations must break down silos and manage teams of teams that embrace different cultures, tools, and systems," says Derek Langone, head of strategic transformation at Digital.ai. "We've found that in large enterprises that succeed at true digital transformation, business and technology teams work collaboratively to define value and drive outcomes. These companies typically organize themselves in terms of value streams, employ an open approach to sharing information, and leverage enterprise-grade solutions that offer full visibility and rich, predictive insights across the entire organization."

Among other findings of the study, 91 percent say they need to get more out of their digital transformation initiatives, while 49 percent are not seeing the results they expected. 56 percent are worried about the return on their investment, 63 percent are worried about releasing security vulnerable products, and 54 percent believe problems with digital transformation have actually hurt their company's bottom line.

The full report is available from the Digital.ai site.

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