In this week's edition of news for CIOs and IT pros, we explore the various ways IT leaders are responding to the pressure to drive digital transformation throughout their organizations.
Digital transformation – Where do I start?
Digital transformation has reached near buzzword status as CIOs and IT leaders are charged with keeping pace with many and varied ways that digital technology is changing business practices and our day-to-day lives. This is happening across all industries – from retail, to education, to banking. Just this week, a new report from IDC Financial Insights revealed that by 2019, one-third of IT budgets at U.S. banks will be dedicated to achieving digital transformation.
As IT leaders embark on their own transformation journey, many are wondering where and how to get started. A popular opinion is to look to the customer. In a Q&A with Martha Heller, Donagh Herlihy, EVP of Digital and CIO at Bloomin’ Brands, discusses how a data-driven approach to deeply understanding their restaurants' customers has had an impact on how he structures his IT team and approaches digital transformation. You can take the same approach if your customers are your organization's employees, as demonstrated by an infographic on user-centric IT that appeared in Forbes this week.
Other IT leaders are turning to more agile and automated processes within their organizations to keep pace with rapidly-evolving technology as well as free up their IT resources for higher level experimentation. Chloe Green writes an informative piece for Information Age on the pros and cons of workload automation and DevOps. Also this week, QASymphony published an article in EnterpriseTech, which urged IT leaders to find the delicate balance between speed and quality when it comes to Agile, and provided four ways to get started.
For more ideas, ComputerWeekly shares insights from four experts on the emerging best practices and new skills that CIOs must have to effectively drive digital transformation. Rakesh Harji from Blue Yonder, Strahan Wilson from Eat, Gah-Yi Vahn of the London Business School, and Christian Benson from Atos, discuss a range of topics – from big data analytics, to presenting digital transformation to the board, to the evolution of the CIO role.
Regardless of how you tackle digital transformation, change management will be a must. Check out the three Cs of effective change management from the Training Journal to hone your change strategy.
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