Our Guide to Tackling Digital Transformation Roadblocks

The majority of businesses are either thinking about or already doing, digital transformation – as it allows them to effectively adapt to a rapidly changing environment. And whilst this can have an abundance of benefits, it also presents several unique challenges. Now, if your organization has begun to invest in digital transformation, or is thinking of doing so, then it’s vital that you consider what these challenges are and how your IT teams can overcome them. And that’s exactly what we’ll be exploring in this article.

With this in mind, we asked our Certero experts to identify the top challenges that can arise when embarking on your digital transformation journey:

Challenge

Digital transformation offers businesses the unique opportunity to improve their everyday strategies on a systemic level – from how the company operates to how the employees are cared for. As a result, your decision making will become more informed, agile and reliable. But perhaps most importantly, your business’ culture will change dramatically.

For some, change can be seen as a negative thing; it’s unfamiliar, untried and untested. And this viewpoint won’t park itself at the office doors and wait until closing time.

Solution

With this in mind it’s important that you frame the changes in a positive yet transparent light and offer the support they need to adapt quickly and effectively. Additionally, you should communicate why these changes are happening and how the business will benefit.

For example, your IT team will have developed vast knowledge and understanding of your operations and processes. And with individuals claiming responsibility for elements like business applications, infrastructure or security, there is often resistance to any change that could be viewed as relinquishing that understanding and control. This is where transforming your understanding of IT capability before anything else is critical to enabling further change in operations – because if IT teams are reliably informed, they can manage business changes with agility and confidence.

At Certero, we’ve designed our Unified Platform to be that helping hand, by providing a single-platform Cloud-based solution that centralizes all the information your IT team could need in to a single solution which means a single repository for IT asset intelligence – say goodbye to legacy data silos. This allows all departments in your organizations to work from the same solution when it comes to all IT Hardware and Software, and with everyone singing from the same hymn sheet you eliminate any miscommunications and discrepancies. For this to be effective we recommend bringing in multiple stakeholders into the tool selection process for your ITAM and SAM solution, this will allow you to fully understand your requirements against the solution’s capability and exactly and how it will benefit your organization.

Having the responsibility of spearheading digital transformation to the entire business’ IT estate alone would be a daunting task for anyone, so ensure you have the backing of key people in the business to make the process much easier.

Challenge

A major issue that businesses face when undergoing a period of digital transformation is that they cannot truly see where all of their assets are and their data is trapped in disparate silos, making it tricky to get an holistic view of the IT estate. And, like anything, without having the full picture it’s impossible to make well-informed and reliable business decisions – so your organization could find itself in a rut before it even witnesses the benefits of digital transformation.

Solution

To ensure that this doesn’t become the case for your organization, it’s important that you have the right solutions in place to keep the puzzle together and allow you to gain complete visibility of your Hardware, Software, SaaS and Cloud estates in a single solution. For larger organizations with numerous moving parts, this is even more imperative.

At Certero, we’ve seen this issue time and time again which means we’ve become experts in dealing with it. Our tried and tested solutions are designed to deliver the data and information your IT teams need to their fingertips – from discovery and inventory to advanced reporting and analytics. And rather than waiting weeks or months for these answers, you can now directly access live IT intelligence 24/7. From this position, your business can undergo its transformation with accurate and reliable knowledge to guide you – meaning the threat of any costly mistakes is kept to a minimum.

This constant availability of real-time data additionally allows your business to track the progress of its digital transformation journey rather than waiting for a retrospective review. So, rather than making amendments and improvements for any future transformation plans, your IT teams can make them when they count.

sChallenge

Digital transformation is all about looking towards digital innovation to optimize everyday business processes, but if your organization has found itself stuck and weighed-down by legacy technical debt and infrastructure that isn’t conducive to transformation, you could find yourself with a problem. This isn’t particularly difficult to understand; if your present technology is notably outdated and cannot withstand the level of transformation that you’re hoping to achieve, you’ll find yourself at an impasse.

Solution

Moving away from legacy systems to new platforms can seem like a daunting step due to the vast amounts of data that they contain and historically, the painful process of implementation and configuration. Pushback from end users may also be a concern, as experienced users are required to learn new systems and processes.

So what are some of the challenges with legacy systems?

• Support and Maintenance: Older systems are less likely to have frequent updates and often have lower levels of support
• Integration: Legacy systems are often unable to integrate with the modern systems that your organization is implementing through the process of digital transformation. Limiting the number of vendors you are able to choose from.
• Data Silos: As mentioned above legacy systems are prone for creating data silos making a holistic view of your IT estate impossible
• Security: As mentioned above updates are much less frequent with legacy systems making them a prime target for cyber criminals.
• Lack of control over modern, hybrid on-premises / Cloud & SaaS environments.

However, it’s not all bad news. If your technologies are Cloud-based, the transition can be much simpler than that of on-premises technologies. Ironically, it’s moving away from the burden of that legacy debt that is the benefit of modernizing and particularly as the new generation of ITAM/SAM solutions like Certero can be provisioned for you easily as SaaS, there really isn’t the overhead that there once was to transitioning to a modern platform.

What’s more, there is a benefit to users’ knowledge when unifying tasks once performed via multiple old toolsets onto a single platform solution, as there’s only one UI to learn and users’ access to information is dramatically increased. That makes operations easier and your staff more versatile and flexible because they can potentially access the tools and information they require with greater autonomy and confidence.

Plus, there’s new hybrid environments to manage, with old ITAM solutions failing to move with the times and the growing use of SaaS and Cloud IaaS / PaaS. Fortunately, there’s solutions that can support this change. By enlisting the help of an experienced IT & software solutions provider, such as Certero, your business can be fully informed on all aspects of your cloud consumption, begin to refine and mature your cloud governance policies, measure, manage and optimize the utilization of these resources and their cost across the business.– and as a result, this can help to facilitate digital transformation.

Challenge

The final roadblock that your business should prepare for before starting its digital transformation journey is an absence of the necessary skills and talent. For your organization to successfully transform, you’ll need to onboard the right skills – whether this is through training existing staff, hiring additional staff or looking for external partners that can fill this skills gap. So you’ll need to weigh up the pros and cons, timescales and perhaps most importantly the costs, attached to each process and find a solution that best suits your business.

To put this into perspective, your business could digitally transform and embrace Cloud-based solutions that promise to streamline your everyday processes. In theory, that’s great. However, if you don’t have the right people on your team who are familiar and experienced with configuring and maintaining cloud environments – and additionally understand the financial processes and information security governance around allocating resources to departments across the business – then you could find yourself without anyone to actively manage the new processes. Cloud resources are notoriously easy to consume and its quick and easy to see these costs get out of control. This means you’ll have wasted time, money and effort.

Solution

You should assess the situation, understand you skills and ensure you have everything you need to make informed business decisions. For example in the arena of IT Hardware, Software, SaaS and Cloud Asset Management by partnering with a company such as Certero, you can ensure that you’re in an informed and agile position to navigate this new territory successfully and with confidence. At Certero we offer more than just a tool, with a in-house services business we are able to benchmark your companies position and our experts help you navigate this new territory and make informed decisions!