In case you aren’t aware, businesses are undergoing a digital transformation significantly more revolutionary than the .com era of the 1990’s - and the transformation is virtually unstoppable. New social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies are driving businesses to create new advantages with customers and the global market. In this four-part series, we will discuss the digital transformation journey, solutions to the technology resource problem, why certain tech resources just won’t work and why businesses are moving toward onshore resources.
The digital transformation is engaging new technologies and requiring IT services solutions to utilize specialized, local teams based on speed-to-market delivery (e.g. Agile delivery), where the teams have fluency and intimacy in the customer, customer’s culture, business and business’ culture.
Today, digital transformation is an endless journey. We have entered an era where new applications and new devices are being released to the market at an accelerated pace. As a result, this journey will create a substantial backlog of IT projects – projects necessary to be completed but projects that can’t be completed because of budget restraints. Budget is and will remain the fundamental inhibitor to digital transformation.
We have identified three possible solutions to the IT backlog budget problem:
1. Increase the IT budget year-over-year
This may happen, but the inevitability of an economic downturn or the fear of an economic downturn will prevent this from happening for any extended period of time. Digital transformation is a long-term and ongoing investment with or without economic downturns.
2. Reduce technical resource cost to the lowest possible amount
The cost of technical resources is the primary budget issue of digital transformation, not the cost of underlying or supporting technologies.
3. Achieve greater efficiency from technical resources
By getting more productivity from each and every resource, you can maximize the output of these resources and in turn maximize the effectiveness of the IT budget.
So What?
The reality is, digital transformation will require all three solutions—increased budget, lower cost technical resources and greater productivity from each and every resource. The primary emphasis of this series will be lower cost resources demanding increased productivity.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the digital transformation series, “Technical Resource Solutions: An Analysis”