The digital transformation bandwagon is a crowded one, as companies rush to modernize for enhanced resilience in an era of post-pandemic financial pressures and operational impacts. But is it really a transformation if the changes don’t stick?
The question is far from hypothetical. In fact, only 30% of digital transformations meet or achieve their targeted value and result in sustainable change. All too often digitization of any kind starts strong before getting bogged down in the complexities under the hood. Where they repeatedly fail is in managing the vast array of technology assets that come along with the modernization effort.
Let’s examine how the failure to proactively integrate and orchestrate these assets is why many digital transformation strategies have stumbled, and how starting a transformation with the right approach to enterprise technology management can help companies avoid this fate.
See also: Effectively Managing and Securing Assets in A Hybrid IT Environment
The COVID pandemic prompted a rapid increase in digital transformation efforts across all verticals. The pace of adoption for digital technologies was sped up by several years as companies rushed to cope with new work-from-home requirements, supply chain disruptions and other impacts. Even today, lingering inflation and economic challenges are keeping the pressure on companies to modernize.
As these digital transformations roll out, more complexity arise from a growing range of technologies being adopted. From new SaaS integrations, multi-cloud deployments, to increased work-from-home connectivity and equipment, we are now dealing with an enhanced digital environment that many are leveraging to cope with current industry conditions. Further adding to the complexity are modern cloud infrastructure paradigms, that automatically fire up and shut down servers.
Such complexities create radically increased workloads for IT asset management technologies and teams. This hobbles the transformation effort with inefficiencies and security gaps from misaligned assets and systems; lost productivity from operational slowdowns; and lost revenue from inefficient tracking and managing of software licenses as organizations rapidly expand use of SaaS and other software products to enable a distributed workforce.
Today, 76% of enterprises are using multiple systems to find inventory data about different technologies, which only exacerbates security, compliance and operational challenges. Fortunately, the right enterprise technology management framework can help bring order to the IT Tower of Babel that resists integration and blocks alignment of technology assets. The idea is to create a data management and orchestration layer modernizing the traditional IT asset management (ITAM) approach across the enterprise estate.
From this privileged position in the technology management landscape, organizations gain a holistic view of all related systems across IT, security, finance, HR and other divisions as a unified data pipeline. The result is drastically improved visibility – a single pane of glass for analyzing and exerting control across all assets, dependencies and workflows.
Critically important to success is to ensure the enterprise technology management framework remains accessible to anyone – technical or non-technical – to build multi-step workflows that automate business logic and simplify cross-functional business tasks. While all this is easier said than done, upping the asset management playbook in these ways will give digital transformation efforts the staying power to not only start strong, but mature and scale across the organization.
We’ve stressed how an advanced enterprise technology management strategy is a foundational step that should ideally be in place at the very start of the transformation. Just as important is choosing the right use cases to prioritize – ones that will have the most impact in aligning assets and strengthening the IT estate upon which the digital transformation is built.
One of the most impactful and enterprise-wide priorities is the effective management of software licenses. A smart, integrated technology management approach can enhance revenue and compliance by eliminating over-licensing and under-licensing of software. This is achieved by acquiring data from across the IT portfolio and mapping that to purchased licenses and statuses, automatically. As a result, teams can get more accurate and up-to-date data on software usage, conduct more strategic licensing negotiations with vendors and automate the process of software license audit compliance.
Other areas where modern technology management is particularly helpful for supporting digital transformation include better purchasing and provisioning decisions via aggregated trend analysis on IT consumption. It can also safeguard the enterprise by eliminating coverage gaps in cybersecurity asset management, and by enabling “zero-trust” workplaces with granular insight and control into asset access and usage by user communities.
Digital transformations can be undermined by modern pitfalls of complexity and scale that persist in an economically challenging, post-pandemic business climate. The secret to overcoming these pitfalls lies in modern IT asset management. When implemented proactively via the right enterprise technology management approach, it can be the foundation for a successful and durable digital transformation.
Udo Waibel is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Oomnitza.
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