Digital transformation delays cost businesses millions

Digital transformation is still seen as a priority by many enterprises, but research for low-code application development platform, Toca, reveals the extent of the challenges faced by IT teams in delivering these projects.

Budget constraints, a lack of collaboration across the wider business, legacy systems, a shortage of developers and integration challenges are seen as the top five barriers to transformation initiatives.

In consequence 88 percent of IT decision makers are facing costly project delays with the average digitization delay lasting five months at a cost of £20,200 ($21,569) a day, totaling £3,070,400 ($3,278,500).

"Organizations are focusing attention on digital transformation projects to drive new business opportunities and to meet the growing expectation for seamless customer journeys, which have been heightened by newer, digital-first competitors entering the market," says Mat Rule, founder and CEO of Toca. "This has placed IT teams under significant pressure, with issues like shorter timelines, tight budgets and legacy processes impacting the success of the projects. And with spiraling cost overruns and delays lasting months at a time, businesses are facing a growing issue as they try to deliver value with new applications and systems."

Among other findings of the survey of 200 IT decision makers, 68 percent of organizations' digital transformation projects are now expected to be delivered three times faster than five years ago. However, 72 percent of IT leaders say the waiting lists for digital projects are getting longer. As a result, 71 percent are struggling with the pressure of innovation.

Employee satisfaction, customer service and productivity are the top three areas being negatively affected by failure to match the speed of expected delivery for new applications or systems. Also 72 percent of IT leaders believe the days of large-scale projects are over, favoring smaller projects that deliver incremental business benefits faster.

Despite this 94 percent that, "building apps, connecting systems and automating processes faster is business imperative." To achieve this, 89 percent of IT decision makers state they would prefer to leverage legacy systems to speed up digital projects, rather than rewrite and platform them.

You can get the full report from the Toca site.

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