Digital transformation – everybody wants it, but few can agree on how to go about it. With the inexorable rise of smartphones and increasing expectation of inter-device connectivity, 2018 will be the year of make or break for enterprise digital transformation strategies.
Now, new research has found half (51%) of UK IT leaders struggle to secure boardroom consensus for how to achieve digital transformation objectives. According to the recent survey, just two in five of their European counterparts faced similar attrition.
“One of the key lessons of successful digital transformations is to remember who a transformation should ultimately benefit – the end user of a service, whether a customer or worker” said Perry Krug, Principle Architect at Couchbase in a guest piece on the topic.
The survey of IT decision makers revealed the main concern around digital transformation success surrounds their ability to integrate legacy technologies with cloud-enabled applications (55%). A close second place was uncertainty around the changing political climate (52%) and a lack of talent/skills available to drive projects (52%).
“With Brexit on the horizon, the UK faces unprecedented change and uncertainty in the market and it’s fair to assume this is impacting decision making at the highest level” said Mark Lewis, EVP products and development at Interoute. “But it’s never been more important for UK businesses to haul their IT talent out of running just the day-to-day business systems, and into creating the business processes and customer experiences that will make their products and services outstanding.”
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Cost expectations of digital transformation remain high, though British tech bosses are not as pessimistic as some Mainlanders. Two-thirds of IT decision makers in Denmark expected to splurge at least 20% more of the IT budget on skills in digital transformation rather than any other ability. This compared to 63% of like professionals in France and 61% in the UK.
“IT skills are in short supply for businesses across Europe, which is why leadership is needed to avoid being left behind in this new digital world,” said Lewis. “To make the most of the opportunities presented by digital transformation, IT professionals must work together with C-Suite executives to act quickly and decisively.”
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The research was carried out independently by Coleman-Parkes Research on behalf of Interoute in August and September 2017 of the 820 European IT decision makers from major organisations across 9 countries.
