What Critical Challenges IT Transformation Solves

Learn how to solve IT operations challenges and build a successful IT strategy.

Macroeconomics, headwinds of a recession, sticky inflation, growing unemployment, and rising interest rates all contribute to businesses taking a mute approach to transformation. But this is exactly when businesses and their executives should double down on the transformation initiatives. 

In this article, we will focus on the challenges that enterprises overcome during an IT transformation. Explore the mechanism and benefits of IT Transformation. 

What is Intelligent IT Transformation

Intelligent IT transformation is the process of leveraging digital technologies to change how a business operates and delivers value to its customers. It aims to streamline the processes, improve customer experience, and build new revenue funnels.

IT transformation is a strategic solution that helps organizations facilitate their work and optimize operations with no code efforts:

• Focusing on the entire business – transforming every part of the organization, from back-office processes to customer experience.
• Bringing customer-centricity – improving the processes to create the best possible, personalized experience for the customer within an efficient and competitive organization.
• Enhancing tech stack – using various technologies, like AI, big data analytics, cloud computing, and mobile apps, while optimizing the existing ones.

Challenges of IT Operations Transformation

As complex time-consuming processes affect the whole business, IT infrastructure transformation faces a plethora of challenges. These are mostly related to managing a growing volume of data and optimizing workflows and include:

• Organizational silos – The lack of clarity in the roles and dependencies within an organization and different decision-making procedures across teams and departments are the first elements that may hinder IT transformation within an enterprise. An organizational silo affects all the steps of this process, from planning to implementation.
• The growing volume of digital data – Data is generated constantly in every business – with each minute, new information is collected and the more data an organization has the better decisions may be made based on it. Yet, with IT transformation, this is quite a challenge – applying new technologies to reorganize all the data, improve the way it is collected, and pick the most relevant information is as difficult as the size of the database, meaning that it rarely is easy.
• Digital skills gaps – Another major obstacle for IT transformation strategies is the lack of sufficient digital skills across the organization. No technology will be effective if the users are unable to utilize it effectively, thus education becomes a critical part of such transformation.
• Legacy technologies blocking change – Old tech stack which is difficult or impossible to update often creates many problems for IT operations transformation. The data has to be extracted into new systems, and many issues emerge on the way. 
• Lack of IT-business resources – With the powerful demand for IT specialists, and a competitive job market, many companies report IT staff shortages. Yet, with the length and magnitude of the transformation process, an understaffed IT team is simply ineffective, implementing changes at a snail’s pace.

Build a Successful IT Strategy and Transformation

Even though your organization may face the abovementioned challenges, good practices will help you build your IT strategy effectively and implement a smooth transformation. What steps should you undertake?

1. Identify opportunity

Think about the future – where will your business be in 5, 10, 15 years from now? What technologies do you need to implement to achieve such a state? How much will it cost your company? Write a vision statement that includes these elements.

2. Develop a plan

With a clear-cut goal, you have to proceed with preparing a plan. Outline the most important milestones, including a timeline, plan your budget and other resources – all the information that is crucial for achieving your aim.

A good idea at this point would be to embrace the principles of Value Stream Investments – come up with measurements to evaluate the ROI of each change that you implement.

3. Create an IT transformation roadmap

A visual representation of your plan is what you need to push forward with the IT transformation strategy. It will help you navigate through the changes, it will show you the direction towards which you are heading, and the next steps to undertake.

4. Overcome information silos

Unifying your information sources through data integration is a key step in every IT transformation. You need to build an infrastructure accessible to all departments and teams where all the information they need is stored. This will help you create a unified vision within the whole organization.

5. Invest in Intelligent transformation technologies

To complete this change seamlessly and as efficiently as possible, you need to invest in the right technologies. Intelligent transformation solutions will let you manage this shift within your company with fewer resources and much faster than traditional methods.

6. Manage change effectively

Finally, you need to be proactive. The transformation cannot be done without the whole organization on board – you need to choose the best time windows to train the staff on new technologies and discuss the changes with the employees. This will let you avoid confusion, struggles, and resistance from your workers.

Overcoming IT Transformation Challenges with Put It Forward

Put It Forward Digital Transformation solution will help you conduct your IT transformation quickly and efficiently. With us, you will quickly see the results such as:

Removed Silos

We offer numerous data integration solutions that will help your business connect the information from various platforms and systems. Due to the live integration, your data will be available in one place for all employees to access, work on, and analyze.

Connected business

Every platform that you use should be connected with the other – only this will let your business thrive. Different teams are dependent on each other, so the only way for them to truly align is through unification. With our solutions, you will optimize your IT infrastructure and transform it to build a truly connected system, introducing automation along 80-90% of it.

Consistent customer experience

Customers strive for a unified experience – they do not wish to receive the same answers over and over again and feel tired when they are asked the same questions for the third or fourth time. With our platform, you will be able not only to create a consistent experience throughout your customer’s whole journey but also to maintain it across different channels, build a truly omnichannel customer experience, and increase the effectiveness of your employee-customer interaction by 100% to 200%!

Accelerated Business Outcomes

With intelligent transformation technologies, you will see the results of changes faster than ever. Due to the large-scale integration of the platforms that your organization already uses, there will be less need for employee training, and your staff will be able to operate within the new ecosystem seamlessly from day one. This will let you reduce your operational costs by up to 30%.

Key Takeaways

IT transformation comes with many challenges: IT staff shortage, lack of digital skills, organization silos, and large volumes of digital data. Yet, with proper goals and plans, written into an IT transformation roadmap it is possible to conduct it effectively. By using intelligent technologies, you may accelerate this process and make the shift easier for your employees while unifying your data sources.

Interested in what Put It Forward can do for you in terms of IT transformation? Get a demo of our platform and let our expert team help you!