Derek Britton, Director of Communications and Brand Strategy, discusses how to balance making the critical decisions about digital transformation in today’s economy.
Few organizations of any size have ignored the importance of digital transformation. Many were forced to quickly implement fundamental digital transformation activities in order to survive the first waves of COVID-19. Others who had already begun the process, found themselves accelerating their efforts because of such a drastic change in the markets.
In an article for InformationWeek, I look at the growing digital transformation industry, which IDC predicts will reach $6.8 trillion by 2023. The tricky part is finding the balance that lets you solve the digital dilemma that most organizations face—how to run today, and transform for the future—all at the same time.
A Proverbial Problem
As the saying goes, you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. And that’s a global truth, although other languages provide equally colorful metaphors—according to Wikipedia, Albanians are told, “You can’t take a swim and not get wet,” while the Czechs might say, “You can’t sit on two chairs at the same time.” What is clear is that while every enterprise’s approach to solving their digital dilemma is unique to the organization, many will need to “fly the plane while it’s being built.”
They need to find the balance between the risks and uncertainties that change engenders, and the need to continue to deliver the goods and services their customers demand. For dynamic and complex IT environments, getting this balance right is the difference between success and failure.
Finding that balance is—to follow the analogy—all about keeping both sides of the scale (current needs and future opportunity) evenly weighted. The trick is to leverage and enhance previous IT investments that created the intellectual property (IP) on which the business now thrives. Then, use it as a springboard for the future. Organizations can keep things running now to ensure near-term success, while at the same time transforming to meet future needs and opportunities. It’s a less risky strategy that enables businesses to adapt more quickly with lower costs.
It’s a difficult—but not impossible—riddle to solve.
Run and Transform: The Key Outcomes You Need
Ultimately, IT organizations must both deliver value while they run day-to-day, and as they transform for the future. The Micro Focus framework for digital transformation includes four important outcomes for organizations who need to run and transform at the same time.
- Accelerate Application Delivery: Scale Agile and DevOps practices across all your environments, to sustain delivery velocity. Combine value stream principles and enterprise scale to make the software factory more intelligent and efficient as you transform.
- Modernize Core Applications. Evolve and innovate your trusted business systems to continue delivering incremental value across the entire organization, from mainframe to distributed, to cloud.
- Simplify IT Transformation: Simplify running a mix of traditional and cloud services with a digital factory approach. Use a unified platform for IT operations to integrate or replace incompatible tools, freeing up resources and accelerating transformation.
- Strengthen Cyber Resilience: Protect against advanced threats, detect threat actors, and recovering from attacks as you run today. Evolve at the speed of change using security analytics for hybrid environments to help your organization transform.
- Analyze Data in Time to Act: Unify your analytics without moving your data to one place to run your analytics practice more efficiently. Ensure that you can support greater volumes of users and data, maintaining performance and scale, for accurate and actionable predictive insights.
Run and Transform: Your Trusted Partner
Micro Focus is one of the world’s largest enterprise software providers, with more than 40 years of experience helping our customers with what’s best for their organizations. We deliver mission-critical technology and services that help tens of thousands of customers worldwide manage core IT elements of their business. Strengthened by a top-10 patent portfolio and expert professional services, our broad set of technology for security, IT operations, application delivery, governance, modernization, and analytics provides the innovative solutions you need to run and transform—at the same time.
