Digital transformation strategies to accelerate business growth

Digital Transformation: Beyond "Lift and Shift"

Increasing the breadth and depth of technology innovation within a modern cloud ecosystem provide a great opportunity for businesses to cross & upsell to existing clients, win new customers and increase operational efficiencies. However, a comprehensive digital transformation program is time consuming, expensive and can pose a risk to the "business as usual" operations. Often, existing IT operations staff are so busy "keeping the lights on" that they struggle to stay abreast of the latest cloud services capabilities and benefits.

Re-factoring legacy application workloads onto modern cloud native SaaS platforms, requires a product driven approach, with functional consultants and developers working together to deliver process automation improvements. Using "commercial off the shelf" SaaS platforms or custom software solutions may make sense but deciding exactly which application platforms to incorporate into your ecosystem is a complex undertaking. With hundreds of CRM, ERP and Line of Business SaaS products available, how does the company leadership finalise a decision on what is the best platform for their business? Many businesses simply do not have access to the required application expertise to deliver on the promise of digital transformation.

In the case of modern workplace solutions, the focus is on team collaboration, productivity & effective employee engagement to maximise staff retention. In my opinion, most requirements can be fulfilled by optimising your existing Microsoft 365 CSP licenses. However, with countless configuration options, its good to understand some of the possibilities that this technology can deliver including: the flexibility to work on any device, from any location whilst protecting your company data, expedited staff onboarding and lost/stolen/faulty device replacements using remote self service set up for laptops and phones, passwordless login using biometric technology to safeguard access to company information resources, secure corporate chat, email, telephone and video collaboration from any device, co-authoring document creation and release management and digital rights management to control access to sensitive information.

When it comes to infrastructure operations, many business have already “lift and shifted” at least some existing workloads into private and public cloud services. However, fewer have embraced a comprehensive re-platforming strategy based on modern devops practices. Re-platforming focuses on optimising serverless endpoint & application runtime environments, managing security, governance & compliance and software life cycle management using cloud native technologies. Rearchitecting legacy custom applications into microservice based ecosystems, enables new functionality to be introduces with high frequency whilst avoiding extended downtime associated with traditional software upgrade processes.

Conclusion

These are time consuming undertakings for busy leadership teams, so working with a CTO advisor with relevant experience of managing this transition will prove immensely valuable. However, many companies cannot justify the expense of a full time CIO/CTO on a six-figure salary. If this is the case in your service provide, why not explore the option of working with a fractional CIO/CTO. These are part time, C-suite technologist who can provide strategic advice and guidance for a fraction of the costs of a full time equivalent. For more information, visit www.digitalselection.co.uk or book a no-obligation 30 min introductory call here