Application Development
Overcoming digital transformation fatigue
Five things to consider for reinvigorating your optimization efforts.
Remember that one amazing toy you simply HAD to have as a kid? It’s all you could think about. Every day without it actually felt painful. But when you finally managed to save up enough money to buy that wonderous thing…what you ended up with was a huge disappointment. It didn’t do what was promised. It broke easily. It was cheaply made. And it quickly was added to your heap of discarded playthings.
A similar splash of cold water seems to be knocking the technology world back a bit. A report from the Everest Group showed that 78% of enterprises questioned had failed to scale or sustain their digital transformation initiatives. That kind of disappointment is creating actual fatigue in the IT department.
The Everest Group goes on to identify “old school” operation models as root cause: doing things the way they’ve always been done, even when trying to “transform.” Unfortunately, that includes the reactionary method of solving operational issues. The quick fix.
With the rapidly accelerating move to digitization of all things business, the need for immediate remedies can sometime outpace the ability to wisely manage. Trying to do too much too fast often results in a tangled mess of bespoke applications, legacy technologies and point-to-point integrations created by shadow projects with little oversight or control.
Reinvigorate efforts with unified platform approach for everything. Yes everything.
Rather than using the “old school” approach of cobbling together point solutions, progressive Enterprise Architects are once again considering unified tactics for rationalizing application and data sources, controlling and standardizing across functional silos, and ending frivolous or unproductive investment choices. But what should EAs consider in a platform solution to ensure it is worthwhile? At the minimum, the solution should have power and functionality to:
- Reduce the risk of data redundancy and inaccuracy. Ad hoc implementation of applications increases the risk of overlapping functionality and duplicate data production. That makes it harder and harder to trust that business decisions are being made with the latest and greatest info.
- Replace shadow IT with delegated development. Empower departments to create no-code/low-code apps with predefined functional libraries. A transformative solution should allow freedom to self-solve, but under a watchful eye and full IT approval.
- Empower traditional developers. The platform should have the “oomph” and pro tools needed for complex, professional developers.
- Replace legacy collaboration systems. Get rid of outdated, on-premise collaboration tools that are yet another source for ad hoc data pools. Replace for flexible, cloud-friendly alternatives.
- Enable holistic reasoning across functions and departments. Empower EAs to consider application development which can solve similar issues across multiple departments.
Get excited about digital transformation again. It can be done.
Yes, it is true that many digital transformation efforts continue to disappoint companies—only 16% in the latest McKinsey survey said their tactics had improved performance in a sustainable way. But you have to wonder how much of that failure was due to old processes and approaches. Especially when you consider that the same survey showed that if a company modified its standard operating procedures, they were 2X more likely to report success.2 The platform play is a proven strategy for revamping processes. In this case, it’s a shiny new thing that will not disappoint.
See how you can energize your own digital transformation reawakening.
Read Application development without the sprawl to learn five ways the Now Platform can support your enterprise architecture.
