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Speed Digital Transformation - Advice for CIOs

Only half of all companies have been able to speed digital transformation despite substantial investment. Read how to succeed.

Only half of all companies have been able to speed digital transformation despite substantial investment. Read how to succeed.

Digitally transforming a business is a lot easier said than done. Most enterprises give it lip service, but few do it the right way. That’s borne out by a study from Wipro Digital, which found only half of all companies have been able to speed digital transformation strategies, despite substantial investments and efforts.

How bad is it? The report said that only 4% of companies get back even half of their digital investment in less than a year.  A majority of those interviewed say it’s taken them two to three years to get back half of their investment. Among the problems holding back digital transformation, the report found, are that 25% senior executives “secretly believe that digital transformation projects in their company are a waste of time.” And 35% of executives say lack of a clear transformation strategy is at fault.

But smart companies can do it right. A Gartner report, “Survey Analysis: How CTOs Can Enable Digital Business Transformation” offers great advice for companies on how to get it done. The report starts out by noting that CIOs can’t do it alone, and need the help of CTOs, who can become the key drivers for the transformation. The good news, according to the survey: “Sixty-five percent of CTOs are already involved in some type of technology innovation activity.”

The report says that CTOs can play a key role in all aspects of a five-stage process working towards digital transformation. The first stage, Ambition, generates interest and excitement about a digital transformation, and determines “the scope of work and the overall strategic focus in becoming a digital business.” CTOs can help in this phase by providing the CIO and others with a “relevant set of emerging technology and technology innovation use cases.” That can include sponsoring an internal IT review of useful disruptive technologies, sponsoring an internal trade show or tech forum, and putting together existing examples of digital businesses that can be used for inspiration or models.

In the next stage, Design, CTOs can help build prototypes that will help transform the business, focusing on using technologies including sensors, mobility, location awareness, and advanced analytics. This serves as a spur to innovation, and a model that can expanded upon.

In the third stage, Delivery, CTOs should help determine the tools that will be used to build new technologies, such as project and portfolio management (PPM) tools, roadmapping tools, and enterprise architecture tools.

CTOs are central to the fourth stage, Scale. According to the report, in this stage, the  “CTOs' top three responsibilities involve the expertise needed to scale: technology infrastructure modernization, technology operational management and technology innovation.”

In the final stage, Refine, there’s a tipping point, and the business becomes a digital one. In this stage, CTOs need to make sure their organization can “respond quickly to disruptions in the market.” That means creating technology innovation programs, modernizing the technology infrastructure, building new technical skills in the company, and more.

Mobile apps are key to digital transformations of any kind. Alpha Anywhere is an ideal business application development and deployment environment for enterprises that can help with digital transformation. It enables users to quickly become proficient in creating mobile business forms and applications that run across all devices. As companies seek to scale and refine the delivery of apps, Alpha Cloud offers the industry's leading cloud deployment solution for business apps.

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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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