Dell EMC announced the results of a new study conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), which revealed that a majority of senior IT leaders and decision-making managers of large companies surveyed around the world indicate their organisations have yet to fully embrace the aspects of IT transformation needed to remain competitive.
While there is a clear imperative for companies to transform their legacy IT, digital transformation is becoming the driving force to making IT transformation a top priority. However the ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve study, commissioned by Dell EMC, shows 95% of survey respondents indicate their organisations are at risk of falling behind a smaller group of industry peers that are transforming their IT infrastructures, processes and delivery methods to accelerate their goals of becoming digital businesses.
Many organisations still measure application cycle times in months, if not years; have siloed infrastructures and continue to grapple with rigid legacy architectures, all barriers to undertaking a successful digital transformation.
“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 Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa at 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.”
The ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve study was designed to understand the role that IT transformation plays toward becoming a digital business. ESG 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, the 1,000 participating organisations were segmented into the following four IT transformation maturity stages:
• Stage 1 – Legacy (12%): Falls short on many – if not all – of 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 respondents (71%) agree that IT transformation is essential to ongoing business competitiveness. Of the ‘transformed’ companies, 85% believe their organisations are in a ‘very strong’ or ‘strong’ position to compete and succeed in their market over the next few years, contrasted with 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.
These companies:
• Are eight times more likely than the least mature organisations to report a highly cooperative relationship between IT and the business
• Made ‘excellent progress’ running IT as a profit centre rather than a cost centre (seven times more likely than the least mature)
• Are seven times more likely than the least mature organisations to have IT viewed by the business as a competitive differentiator
• Leverage IT resources to speed product innovation and time to market (six times more likely than the least mature organisations)
• 96% exceeded revenue targets last year, more than two times the least mature
According to ESG, 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
John McKnight, Vice President of Research and Analyst Services, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “Companies today increasingly rely on technology to grow and improve all aspects of their business. However, ESG’s research found that fully ‘transformed’ IT organisations are admittedly rare at this time. The good news is that there are incremental benefits to be had by making any progress along the maturity curve, which can be achieved by emulating the behaviours of these ‘transformed’ organisations.”
Additional Resources:
• Take the IT Transformation Self Assessment
• Read the complete ESG IT Transformation Maturity Curve research paper
