Why future-facing companies should care about transforming their IT organization

IT investments are crucial for forward-thinking enterprises. Identifying where to begin, however, can be complex. Luckily, there’s a straightforward answer: IT transformation is the fundamental starting point for organizations ready to invest in staying ahead of the game.

Here, we’ll explore the reasons behind this. We’ll outline how transforming your IT organization creates the backbone for the digital transformation that follows, supports ensuring uninterrupted delivery of core business functions, cultivates transparency and data compliance, and drives business innovation.

IT transformation is the backbone of digital transformation

The importance of digital transformation in business evolution can’t be underestimated — and, to succeed, it needs to build on well-implemented IT transformation that’s already taken place within your enterprise organization.

Defining transformation in enterprise organizations

Effective transformation in enterprise organizations occurs in two phases: IT transformation comes first, followed by digital transformation. IT transformation tends to fall under the remit of CIOs. For them, the priority is evolving the organization’s IT operating model. Digital transformation, by contrast, is the priority for CEOs. They’re seeking to evolve the organization’s business model with IT solutions.

Often, the two transformation phases are conflated or confused, with digital transformation being focused on as the sole end goal. In reality, however, successful digital transformation needs IT transformation to happen first.

Let’s put this into context:

Your enterprise organization is evolving its business model. Your various business units want to digitalize the services they offer your customers and they’re requesting new, up-and-coming technology to get there. From their perspective, the need for digital transformation — the business case — is simple. The latest technology, tooling, and efficient automation will supercharge data-driven decisions and underpin a future-ready business model.

When it’s faced with these requests, however, your IT department has a problem. It’s simply not got the technical capabilities that it needs to deliver on them. Why? Because IT transformation needs to happen first. This ensures your company’s IT organization has the maturity and capacity required to act as an accelerator for your digital transformation, rather than hold it back.

In brief, digital transformation can only happen as a continuation of the changes made during your organization’s IT transformation. First transforming your IT organization builds solid, future-facing technical foundations for digital transformation — the business-focused phase — to then take place.

Smart IT transformation safeguards your core business functions

Your IT organization is the heart of your enterprise organization, ensuring your core business functions stay up and running. It supplies all the required applications, technology, data, and key infrastructure to your various business units. Powering your entire workforce with data-driven workflows and smart automation.

Transforming your IT operating model needs to ensure these core business functions can continue running, even while your transformation process takes place. It’s crucial to keep the lights on even while you’re rewiring your IT. Introducing and adapting to new technologies (and enhancing agility, transparency, faster time-to-market, and cost-effectiveness) all need to happen whilst you continue to deliver services to your customers. This can be achieved with well-implemented IT transformation.

IT transformation supports transparency and data compliance

90% of the time, the quick wins that enterprise organizations can achieve in their IT transformation are related to building a solid, secure data foundation. In addition, gaining a clear overview of your applications, ownership, and consumption paves the way to understanding where the gaps and areas for improvement are in your organization. With these strands of your IT transformation in place, well-thought-out digital transformation can follow.

IT transformation fuels business innovation

As the foundation of digital transformation, IT transformation creates the capabilities your business needs to innovate. With the backbone of your transformed IT operating model in place, your IT brains will have the capabilities they need to deliver on digitalization requests from your business brains. But transforming your IT organization isn’t just about delivering highly efficient, rapid, cost-effective, and transparent IT within your enterprise. It’s about ensuring these factors come into play throughout future, data-driven business model developments, too. Fuelling business innovation — that’s central to the importance of digital transformation, which is itself built on strong IT transformation.

So, what should my IT organization look like in the future?

Pulling together the strands we’ve explored paints the picture for your IT organization’s future:

• Set up with the technical tools, maturity, and capacity to deliver on the business side’s digital transformation requests
• Seamlessly delivering core business functions while your IT infrastructure and digital services both continue to evolve
• A data foundation supporting transparent, compliant, and secure data use and management
• Providing a fertile and agile, yet reliable, launchpad for business innovation

IT transformation with IT4IT

At DXC ServiceNow Strategic Business Group, we use the IT4IT™ framework[1] to identify clients’ unique enterprise transformation challenges. Across people, processes, knowledge, data, technology, and integrations, we identify areas for improvement and create a detailed, tailored strategy to achieve your goal state.

The assessment we’ve developed using IT4IT is unique — designed to quickly identify gaps and quick wins for your IT transformation plans. The output of this assessment is a step-by-step blueprint and transformation roadmap for all the key capabilities within your IT organization. This will either accelerate your current transformation programs or give you unique insight into where to begin your transformation journey. And from intelligent IT transformation, successful digital transformation follows.

To talk more with our team about transforming your IT organization, don’t hesitate to get in touch.