Many businesses are still working on building out sustainable models for their distributed workforce from 2020, as well as planning their digital and strategic priorities for the coming year. While most understand that IT is playing an ever-growing role across industries and that there are many benefits of digital transformation, some may struggle with how to get things started.
Digital transformation goes beyond implementing new tech. It requires effective strategy, coordination and delivery, as well as an understanding of what transformation requires. This can involve changes to and modernization of network architecture, hardware, software, IT service management, and data storage and access. As a result, it is an enterprise-wide effort that demands professional expertise and coordination.
Here are a few tips to accelerate digital transformation:
Prioritize building a transformation roadmap
Effective strategy is behind any IT transformation. This means developing a clear, coherent vision of the current and future state of an IT environment, as well as a roadmap dedicated to the scope, scale and timeline of the transformation.
To ensure an effective and successful transformation, businesses must architect a roadmap that not only considers the main problems and overall goals, but evaluates your entire current state in order to develop a plan to design and implement an IT strategy fit for your business. This means identifying business issues, process bottlenecks, antiquated legacy workflows and technologies, analyzing budgets and outlining potential strategies.
Some initial questions to consider:
- What’s the reason for your digital transformation?
- What challenges and objectives led you to look for a transformation solution?
- What are you looking for post-transformation?
Embrace hybrid IT.
Traditional IT was not set up to deliver new projects in rapid succession. The pandemic has demonstrated how quickly entire industries can shift and that as a result, IT infrastructures require secure, reliable, cost-effective technology that can scale alongside businesses.
Encompassing the cost efficiencies of the public cloud and the security of a dedicated private cloud environment, a hybrid cloud approach to IT offers the best of both worlds—allowing you to maximize business performance spend and agility without additional risk. With dexterity and flexibility built into the hybrid IT model, businesses can better and more reliably respond to unforeseen challenges that cause costly and detrimental downtime.
What’s more, hybrid solutions also have a positive financial impact by lowering costly legacy IT spend.
Partner with IT experts
Even before COVID-19, organizations faced considerable IT challenges. Now IT has only gotten more complicated. It’s increasingly difficult for companies to operate a range of evolving systems and simultaneously keep up with new technologies hitting the market. To lay a resilient foundation for the future in order to meet unforeseen challenges and shifts, and to save on overall IT spend, a technology partner is an invaluable asset in helping determine the best strategy and subsequent solutions across your technology infrastructure.
With their comprehensive industry knowledge, IT professionals can help connect emerging technology and trends to companies’ unique objectives and business innovations. Leveraging seasoned insight and experience in working with various companies and industries, IT experts architect the most effective pathway to mitigating risk and advancing modernization within unique processes and systems.
However, before placing any crucial aspect of your business in the hands of a third-party, just remember to perform proper due diligence to ensure you are working with an ideal IT partner who has the right experience, credentials, processes, expertise and services.
Trust Align to Lead Your Digital Transformation
While the core of a digital transformation is digital, much of the process and potential pitfalls exist outside of the digital space. The planning, strategy, method and people behind digital transformation are integral to its success, and there is no firm better equipped than Align to lead your journey.
Our transformation methodology not only delivers the highest level of stability, visibility and control to your IT operations, our solutions are flexible, scalable and designed to meet your business needs.
Ready to move forward? Contact us to learn more about how Align can help you start your transformation today.
