By now it’s no surprise that most every business must become a digital business – a sentiment reflected in the Digital Transformation Index we released last year. It’s long been my view that in leading businesses, IT will move from supporting the business to becoming the business – which means there is no digital transformation without an underlying IT Transformation. This begs the question: where do IT shops around the world stand in making progress on this front?
The ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve Study commissioned by Dell answers this question and more. What does the study of 1,000 IT practitioners tell us? Let me just highlight some of the most salient results here:
- Across all surveyed companies, four stages of IT maturity were uncovered: Legacy (the least mature), Emerging, Evolving, and Transformed (the most mature). The level of a company’s IT maturity influences their ability to innovate and contribute to the business’s bottom line.
- IT Transformation is strongly correlated with improved business results. Ninety-six percent of Transformed organizations exceeded revenue targets in FY2016, more than twice the rate of Legacy organizations.
- When compared against Legacy, Transformed organizations are seven times as likely to have IT viewed by the business as a competitive differentiator and profit center. In addition, Transformed organizations are six times as likely to report progress in leveraging IT resources to speed product innovation and time to market.
- Evolving or Transformed IT organizations are more agile and responsive in several critical areas: Infrastructure provisioning, on-time and on-budget project delivery, and on-time application development. For example, Transformed organizations complete three times as many IT projects ahead of schedule vs. Legacy.
- Organizations that have achieved greater IT Transformation maturity spend a significantly higher share of budget on innovation: For example, Transformed organizations allocate an incremental 12 percent of their annual IT spend to new projects and initiatives compared to Legacy organizations.
I’d encourage you to review the full report to get a sense for all of the findings. If you want to know where your organization sits on the curve, take the benchmarking survey and find out. If you find yourself at an early stage of maturity, recognize that IT Transformation can be accelerated by breaking it down into practical steps – something we’re committed to helping our customers with, and something we’ll be highlighting at Dell World in May.
