Flexera, a consultancy that supports organisations realise technology’s ability to accelerate business has released the 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report. The inaugural report examines how organisations are approaching digital transformation, including priorities, challenges and strategies.
The report accumulated data from three recent surveys. More than half of respondents—including CIOs and other senior IT leaders—rated digital transformation as their top 2020 priority. This is followed by cybersecurity, cloud and improving the customer experience.
“The term ‘digital transformation’ is used for a wide range of things. It can support a plethora of business goals and challenges,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “We wanted to peel back the layers and understand how organisations prioritise the initiatives needed to succeed with digital transformation. We found that digital transformation is often coupled with cloud initiatives. However, it also needs robust security and governance in order to control risks and costs.”
“Successful digital transformation requires investments in technologies, people and processes that drive business value,” Ryan continued. “Funding for critical initiatives that support the digital enterprise. This includes cloud and cybersecurity, and in turn deliver on the goal of improving customer experience. Success also requires effective governance of cloud-based assets and clear visibility into the cost of cloud resources.”
A few key highlights from the Flexera 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report:
Digital Transformation and Cloud
- AWS and Azure have the largest number of companies using their public cloud environments. Eighty-four percent of organisations surveyed have a multi-cloud strategy.
Governance and Cybersecurity
- Sixty-eight percent of organisations have passed the tipping point for maturity in terms of cloud adoption.
- Eighty-four percent of organisations report cloud governance is the top cloud challenge. However, lack of resources/expertise (79 percent) and security (81 percent) are close behind as major challenges.
- Effective governance is a challenge for all respondents, regardless of cloud maturity level.
Customer Experience and Budget
While centres of excellence often focus on such initiatives as cloud adoption, analytics/big data and artificial intelligence. Those initiatives are all essential to improving customer experience.
- Sixty-five percent of companies plan to reduce the number of data centres, which will enable organisations to reallocate resources to initiatives that drive innovation and improve the customer experience
- Half of organisations surveyed spend more than $1 million per year on public cloud
Survey Methodology
The Flexera 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report uses data from two Flexera reports and one Flexera survey:
- Flexera 2020 State of Tech Spend Report. A total of 303 global respondents from organisations with at least 2,000 employees. They included professionals from across industries, including C-suite executives and IT managers with visibility into IT budgets
- RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report by Flexera. A subset of 456 respondents from enterprises of 1000+ employees were used for this report. This subset was pulled from total of 786 global respondents.
- Flexera 2018 SaaS Survey. Respondents (728) in finance, procurement and IT from enterprises of up to 5,000 employees were used for this report. The report results was made available under an Open Source Creative Commons License so the data may be freely shared.
Enterprise Times: What this means for business?
Traditionally, digital transformation is expected to drive investments in technologies, people and processes that support business value. This may include funding for critical initiatives that support the digital enterprise, including cloud, cybersecurity and customer experience. This is an interesting report that offers insights into the factors driving digital transformation. How IT leaders are approaching the digital transformation journey and the challenges they face along the way.
When asked their top technology priorities for 2020, CIOs and senior IT leaders ranked digital transformation as their top focus. These leaders are reinventing their organisations with the goals of creating an exceptional customer experience and staying ahead of the competition. Using technology to achieve a competitive advantage is the essence of digital business. However, there’s much confusion around what this transformation entails. Furthermore, some organisations utilise ‘digital transformation’ as an excuse for internal re-organisations and re-assembling internal costs.
