Digital Transformation

The total value of global retail eCommerce sales will reach $3.45T in 2019 and by 2040, around 95% of all purchases are expected to be via eCommerce. Small wonder that all enterprises want to trade online and move forward with a digital transformation.

Most large organizations today struggle to leverage new innovations in their business model. They work in hybrid environments, connecting digital and analog technologies together as best they can. The last decade has seen efforts to move business processes online and create digital ecosystems where customers, suppliers, and providers can come together to share a common data processing platform (i.e. a digital platform) that serves all stakeholders. That said, many businesses still operate online shops only to hand-crank orders through traditional back-office systems and processes.

Leadership teams, frustrated by slow-paced IT results, go headlong into a massive organizational re-design just to release the ‘innovation handbrake and get their digital transformation plans moving along the road. They approach their digital transformation as a wholly ’new project’ and support initiatives with dedicated Development Operations (DevOps) teams and new toolsets.

There are risks to a bold approach that ignores well-adopted IT project safeguards in a rush to achieve a big-ticket win at all costs. While the rewards of digital enablement to business models are known to be considerable, the success rate of software projects remains low. Data quality issues are a constant threat to step-change innovation projects. Re-using data can expose poor data capture protocols, a lack of good data husbanding, and ill-thought-through data models. And IT leaders know, there’s always a risk that the digital transformation being considered today could be the legacy application of tomorrow!