Being in the middle of a digital transformation can be a time of excitement, confidence and risk-taking. Businesses are evolving, employee career paths are expanding and the way we market to our customers is changing. Even buyers’ journeys are taking a turn down a path that may not have existed several years ago.
This post originally appeared on IDC’s UK Blog, and concentrates on European data. To see the original post, click here.
“Digitally determined” organizations no longer ask if something is possible. They assume it is. Corporate leaders identify what they wish to achieve. Those goals are broken into use cases. The organization then works backward to determine what technologies are needed. IT suppliers need to be on board with these use cases. Many suppliers say they put customers first and that they work backward from business goals to create their products.
IT has always had to support audits and certifications and navigate through what seems like constantly changing requirements. Compliance was visible to the board and IT had to answer to the board. That visibility, though, was rarely outside the building – and historically more top of mind for the CFO, the audit committee, internal audit and the CIO.
In the United States today, women account for 47% of the overall workforce, yet only 25% of IT workers are female according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The tech industry’s efforts to raise the inclusivity of women as employees have been sporadic and inconsistent over the last 50 years, though the issue has certainly gained more notoriety in recent years. Yet despite employers’ efforts to introduce numerous programs to help educate, hire and retain women in technology, women remain significantly underrepresented at all levels.
For CIOs, metrics are a key means of measuring the performance and effectiveness of their IT organizations in support of organizational improvement. During the recent IDC web conference ” New Metrics & KPIs for the Digitally Transformed IT Organization,” my colleague Bill Keyworth and I shared the results from our latest IDC MeasureScape survey and discussed new metrics and KPI’s for digitally transforming IT organizations working on infrastructure modernization and cloud adoption.
Customer Experience (CX) will have a greater influence over future purchase decisions, say 93% of tech buyers. CX improvement must become a top initiative for CMOs or marketing will be the proverbial canary in the coal mine – the first to be blamed if the pipeline erodes due to customers’ poor experience. The CMO’s conundrum? Marketing can’t do this alone. To succeed, companies must integrate into an adaptable, team-based, organization focused on customer success.
“Architecture is not about installing infrastructure, but designing ways that information is stored and moved,” says Joe Spagnoletti, CIO of US LBM, a $3 billion specialty distributor of lumber, roofing, siding, and other building materials across 30 states. “When it comes to technology, we want to stay ahead of our competition, but not our technology partners,” he says.
Before diving into the key actions you can follow to transform your procurement organization, let’s consider a recent scenario I heard from a client. This will give you a better picture of the kinds of problems the key actions provided further in this article can help you tackle.
Digital transformation has been changing the global business landscape in several ways, but one of the most important for organizations…
