According to McKinsey, the goal of digital transformation is to build a competitive advantage by continuously deploying tech at scale to improve customer experience and lower costs. Amid today’s uncertain economy, digital transformation is arguably more important than ever to remain afloat, not just competitive. EY recently found that in current economic and financial uncertainty, 94% of tech executives plan to increase their IT investment over the next year. An organization’s ability to maximize its IT resources will directly impact its overall operations and bottom line.
Recently, Rocket Software surveyed 275 U.S.-based IT directors and VPs in companies with more than 1,000 employees, asking them about their current IT stressors and approach to modernizing IT infrastructure. When respondents were asked what modernization imperatives are causing them to lose sleep at night, the need to improve overall IT performance (60%) topped the list, followed by data security (50%), process risk and compliance (46%), and the need to improve agility (41%).
Optimization also rose to the top of IT leaders’ lists: 67% measure success within their IT organization by better optimizing resources. Optimizing IT resources—namely infrastructure, processes, and people—fuels digital transformation and modernization, which drives businesses to keep pace in today’s tough economy.
Infrastructure
All business leaders are talking about adopting the cloud. But equally important to the cloud is the mainframe, which many businesses were built on. That said, relying strictly on the mainframe or cloud prevents businesses from capturing the full power of their tech stacks, which is why most are adopting a hybrid approach.
An astonishing 93% of IT leaders from Rocket Software’s survey said they believe their organization needs to embrace a hybrid infrastructure model that spans from mainframe to cloud, and 65% said implementing a hybrid cloud strategy is their top priority. Linking mission-critical content across mainframe, distributed, and cloud technologies allows organizations to prevent disruptions on day-to-day operations, increase overall efficiency, and bolster the optimization of IT resources.
Process
Rocket Software’s survey found that 30% of IT leaders spend 6-10 hours per week on manual data entry and analysis and 33% spend 11-15 hours per week on it.
IT professionals are increasingly turning to automation to help them optimize workflows, reduce costs, and deliver better employee and customer experiences. With automation, businesses can optimize resources within an organization and empower employees to reduce the time they spend on manual tasks, freeing them up to focus on more strategic work that only humans can do. DevOps has also emerged as a way for IT teams to increase efficiency and output, as it allows IT pros to evolve and improve products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development. The survey found that 58% of IT leaders consider DevOps to be a top priority.
People
IT leaders are under enormous pressure to do more with less and create an IT department that can optimize their organization’s resources and reduce exposure to risk. On top of this, there is a lack of skilled, experienced professionals in the workforce. In fact, IDC has predicted a global shortage of four million developers by 2025.
With tools such as DevOps and process automation, IT leaders can eliminate their business environment’s dependence on expensive, hard-to-find expertise; providing leaders with the insights needed to improve decision-making.
Business leaders are laser-focused on progressing digital innovation and improving the customer experience all while lowering overall costs. The key to achieving this is to optimize IT infrastructure, processes, and people.
Learn more about how companies can optimize their IT.
