One of the biggest goals for IT departments across various sectors has been the drive to digitalize applications and software. Legacy applications that were created to accomplish very specific goals now need to be more agile in the workplace. Instead of compartmentalizing aspects of digital infrastructure, sights must broaden to allow seamless integration between vital business processes, which digitalization can help businesses achieve.
A project designed to digitalize corporate infrastructures bring a variety of tangible benefits, such as:
- The sharing of data across applications and departments, which can allow useful insights into sales, customer satisfaction and costs incurred by business operations.
- An improvement to workflows, making workforces more efficient and improving morale by lessening the need for mundane administrative tasks.
- Digitalization can also open businesses to new product distribution methods and customer service platforms.
Digitalization: It is the transition from multiple "one purpose, one goal" applications to a platform of interconnected and flexible applications which integrate seamlessly to share data and provide valuable insight. This allows for more outcome-centric experiences within businesses.
Why is it necessary to shift from Applications IT to Digital IT?
Digitalization was first popularized in the marketing sector, before being adapted across other departments. Previously, development teams aimed to qualitatively assess existing business applications at regular intervals. This typically involves:
- A waterfall method of collecting business requirements. These are then used to develop new software designs and architectures, which provide resolution to existing issues or grant new functionality. This process can take between 6-9 months from start to finish and is vulnerable to delays and changing requirements.
- Assigning a fixed budget to be used by development teams, which can result in complications. These IT projects are vulnerable to being under-funded, which can severely dampen the ability to release major new application functions in a reasonable time—while also meeting quality expectations.
While this was a viable solution in the past, there is now an urgent need for businesses to assess their applications in real time, delivering quality improvements with a much shorter delay. These days, technology needs to be viewed as an integral part of a business plan, in order to ensure agility in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace.
What does it take to transition to Digital IT?
The transition to digital products and services means that businesses are making a promise of "new value" to their customers. This new value can come in the form of convenience of use, cost reductions and improved access to support.
This improvement to the consumer side must also be mirrored internally. To maintain agility within IT teams, employees need to build new competencies and skills to ensure they can meet expectations. New software development life cycles must also be introduced to allow for the timely resolution of error reports from users and other staff.
The transformation from Applications to Digital IT involves 4 major changes:
Unfortunately, many application development teams are not recognizing this shift in requirements. The Trasers Ab-Initio 2019 Survey provides useful insights on what needs to be improved when digitalizing parts of a business:
- Only 20% of IT teams are fully aligned with their corporate IT roadmap, which outlines where the business is going and what IT needs to do to support further growth.
- Around 12% of businesses have successfully integrated multiple critical business processes through a digitalization process. Despite this, only 7% of this successful group would say they are ready to deliver full real-time integration across the board for customers and staff.
- Only 10% of IT teams are setting new enterprise standards or creating disruptive business models regarding IT applications. A few concepts being used include Design Thinking, AI, Automation and rethinking the approach to development operations.
Lastly, those that have made the biggest strides in transitioning to Digital IT seem to be high-technology industries and fledgling startups across varying industries and services. High-tech businesses like automotive and hardware manufacturers are on the cusp of full digital transitions, with many smaller startups being built on a fully digital foundation. Larger companies must take notes from this and quickly start transitioning so they can effectively support further digital transformations in the future.
