Executive Introduction
It’s no longer news that business performance and IT performance are more closely linked than ever before. This is not only changing how businesses and organizations are evolving in terms of effectiveness, outreach, and business model; it’s also impacting IT organizations as they struggle to play a more proactive and strategic role in supporting and even redefining business needs. These changes are being accelerated by technologies such as mobile, cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as initiatives like agile and DevOps. But above all they are being driven by a new population of consumers who have become comfortable with making digital services an integral part of their everyday lives.
As many in the industry have observed, this is no small transition. As shown in EMA’s Q3 2015 research, “Digital and IT Transformation: A Global View of Trends and Requirements,” the very role of IT is changing from a reactive, back-office citadel to a more informed business partner seeking to optimize technology to business, organizational, and personalized outcomes.
The term most often applied to this transition as viewed from a business perspective is “digital transformation”—as businesses leverage digital services for everything from improved internal efficiencies and customer and partner outreach to brand visibility and market loyalty. In fact, digital services are themselves increasingly becoming “products” across a growing number of verticals. In parallel, when an organization is focused on IT becoming more effective in and of itself in support of the business, the term most typically used has been “IT transformation.” This typically means achieving a more cohesive, fluid, automated, and data-enhanced way of working across all critical stakeholders.
Perhaps the single most dominant finding of this research is that digital and IT transformation are closely related and complementary—a necessary handshake rather than two separate worlds. In other words, an initiative targeting digital transformation without strong investments in IT transformation is significantly less likely to be effective than a 50/50 partnership between the business and IT.
This white paper will examine key requirements for enabling superior business-to-IT alignment through best practices, technology investments, and metrics for visibility and insight. The report will also highlight Blazent’s unique capabilities in data quality management, data integration, and advanced analytics to provide a compelling foundation for the “digital intelligence” needed to make digital and IT transformation a reality.
Demographics
This white paper leverages data from “Digital and IT Transformation: A Global View of Trends and Requirements.” In August 2015, EMA surveyed more than 300 business and IT professionals across the globe. Nearly half were based in North America; the remaining 50% of respondents were evenly split between the Asia–Pacific (APAC) and Europe–Middle East–Africa (EMEA) regions. All companies represented had 250 or more employees, with the majority of respondents from organizations with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees. The leading industry verticals were manufacturing, finance/ banking/ insurance, retail, high-technology software, and healthcare.
What Is “Digital Intelligence” and Why Does it Matter?
EMA defines “digital intelligence” as the data-driven insights shared among IT and business stakeholders to support common transformative goals. Digital intelligence can enhance change management and agile software development by providing superior guidance for development, service management teams, operations, IT executives, and business stakeholders seeking to improve the speed, quality, and relevance of IT service delivery. Similarly, digital intelligence might be directed at IT asset optimization in support of business goals and business needs by providing a common interconnected fabric of insights across IT domains, IT service consumers, and business planners. Other examples might span everything from service performance to optimizing cloud for IT and business efficiencies, to security, to IT operations, as well as compliance and risk management requirements.
As this report will show, digital intelligence requires the effective assimilation of many different data sources into a common trusted fabric of insights to support more effective collaboration across all key “digital” stakeholders. Digital intelligence also requires team building and alignment from a process and organizational perspective. Figure 1 shows how similar IT and digital transformation are in terms of their organizational drivers.
The need for business and IT-to-business alignment was suggested throughout EMA’s research. For example, initiatives with a 50/50 ownership between IT and business stakeholders were more likely to be successful than initiatives for which ownership was skewed toward one group or the other. In parallel, the research showed that a 50/50 division between IT and digital transformation reflected a more progressive model than when transformational directions were skewed to favor predominantly IT or predominantly digital transformation separately. This 50/50 group was also more likely to:
• Be slated for IT growth
• See benefits from best practices
• Leverage technologies in support of transformation
• Leverage metrics for public and private cloud
• Have a balanced focus between DevOps and agile
Three Key Areas of Digital Differentiation in Aligning IT with the Business
EMA looked at a number of areas in its research on digital and IT transformation, but three in particular stood out:
• Attention to best practices
• Investment in good technologies
• Insight and visibility as delivered through good metrics and KPIs
Not surprisingly, good shared data was an underpinning for success in all three areas.
Process, Best Practices, and the Digital Future
Good processes are central to making IT more effective in and of itself, as well as supporting more effective ways of working between IT and the business. In fact, 79% of the respondents in EMA’s research linked their transformational initiatives to best practices, and those who did not were significantly less likely to be successful. Figure 2 shows the range of best practices for both IT and digital transformation. The data once again reflects a strong commonality between digital and IT transformation—this time in context with best-practice priorities.
The benefits of following best practices were manifold. The top four were:
1. Improved IT productivity
2. Improved IT services in terms of quality and reliability
3. Reduced IT costs
4. Improved IT services in terms of relevance and business value
A few interesting distinctions emerged when looking at best-practice benefits through the lens of IT transformation versus digital transformation. For instance, those focusing primarily on digital transformation saw their benefits more in terms of “improved business productivity” as well as “reduced IT costs” and “improved agility in delivering IT services.”
Blazent’s Unique Role in Shaping Processes
Fragmented data sources lead to fragmented ways of working, which in turn inhibit more fluid and effective processes. The three comments below highlight just a few examples of how and where Blazent has empowered new and better ways of working with well-aligned processes across relevant stakeholders.
Data Management Technologies and Transformation Go Hand in Hand
When asked to indicate which types of technologies were associated with their transformation initiative, only 1% of respondents indicated that their initiative was “in no way technology related.” The remaining 99% of respondents chose an average of nearly five different technology categories from the 19 listed. Moreover, a strong majority (73%) of respondents saw these technologies as driving their transformational initiatives, with the remaining 27% viewing technology as simply supportive. Figure 3 shows a wide spectrum of technology linkages, with data quality management and data integration both residing within the top five of the 20 technology-related choices.