A strong majority of organisations around the world are at risk of falling behind competitors as they fail to embrace the aspects of IT Transformation needed to remain competitive.
According to a survey by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) on behalf of Dell EMC, some 95% of respondents are falling behind an elite set of competitors who are accelerating their digital business goals through IT transformation.
While there is a clear understanding of the need for transformation, with almost three quarters (71%) agreeing they will not be competitive without IT transformation, there remains the majority who fear they are not doing enough.
The benefits are also clear, as the survey found that those organisations who are further on the path to maturity in IT transformation are seven times more likely to recognise IT as a competitive differentiator and profit centre, while 96% of these mature organisations exceeded revenue targets last year and were more than twice as likely to meet revenue goals.
“These findings mirror how the vast majority of customers are telling us they need to optimise their existing infrastructures to take advantage of digital-age opportunities,” said David Goulden, president, Dell EMC. “However, the research shows that most respondents are falling behind a small and elite set of competitors who have cracked the IT Transformation code, and they’re competing more vigorously because of it. As organisations progress in their IT Transformation investments, they can overcome the conflict between legacy IT and digital business initiatives to realise their goals, speed time to market and increase competitiveness.”
ESG said the 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve study was designed to understand the role that IT Transformation plays toward becoming a digital business. The surveyor employed a research-based, data-driven maturity model to identify different stages of IT Transformation progress and determine the degree to which global organisations have achieved those different stages based on their responses to questions about their organisation’s on premise IT infrastructure, processes and organisational alignment.
Based on the global survey responses, ESG segmented the 1,000 or so participating organisations into the following four IT Transformation maturity stages:
- Stage 1 – Legacy (12%): Falls short on many, if not all, the dimensions of IT Transformation in the ESG study
- Stage 2 – Emerging (42%): Showing progress in IT Transformation but having minimal deployment of modern data centre technologies
- Stage 3 – Evolving (41%): Showing commitment to IT Transformation and having a moderate deployment of modern data centre technologies and IT delivery methods
- Stage 4 – Transformed (5%): Furthest along in IT Transformation initiatives
The majority of the small segment of companies that are “Transformed” believe their organisations are in a “very strong” or “strong” position to compete and succeed in their market over the next few years, which contrasted with less than half (43%) of the least mature companies.
The “Transformed” organisations report the most progress in leveraging IT resources to speed product innovation and time to market; automating manual processes and tasks; and running IT as a profit centre rather than a cost centre.
The survey also found the adoption of modern data centre technologies, such as scale-out storage systems and converged/hyper-converged infrastructure, can improve the agility and responsiveness of infrastructure provisioning, IT project delivery and application development.
The study found:
- 54% of all respondents use converged or hyper-converged infrastructure to support applications
- 58% of all respondents have adopted scale-out storage systems in some capacity
- Roughly 50% of respondents are committed to software-defined as a long-term strategy and have begun to implement, evaluate or plan for software-defined technologies
“This research points up the need for organisations to fully embrace IT Transformation to remain competitive,” said Catherine Doyle, Enterprise Sales director, Dell EMC Ireland. “A divide is opening up between companies that have already turned to modern data centre technologies and IT delivery methods, and those which have yet to deploy digital business initiatives. The simple fact is that a failure to transform could mean that organisations get left behind. Dell EMC is working with organisations to help them keep pace by applying the learnings of industry peers which are the furthest along the IT Transformation Maturity Curve.”
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