We’ve been helping clients for a number of years now to get started with their digital transformations, and we know the importance of good strategy. One key area in our method when engaging with clients is looking at what ICT challenges they are currently facing. Not just to help determine where change needs to happen most urgently, but to also guide clients' understanding of how these struggles manifest themselves within an organisation and ultimately how to sidestep them to ensure success!
By taking an objective view as to where, when, how, and why these blockers appear, it is a key area to enable clients to be successful with their transformation. Here are some key areas we’ve seen customers struggle with over the years and if you’re struggling with these too… the steps to think about getting through them:
2. Technical debt or legacy - End-of-life infrastructure, legacy applications, and out-of-date end-user technologies causing numerous incidents for ICT to deal with, leading to a poor experience for end-users. Difficulty in planning for change and not building change into the longer-term ICT strategy and aligning to the needs of what the organisation wants can lead to putting off the refresh to the point where only a huge project fixes the issue, causing lots of disruption to end-users and masses of cost that the organisation must invest just to get the service experience back to acceptable levels.
3. Lack of budget - Throughout the clients we engage with, we find a lack of budget for resources as one of the top reasons for the inability to start to digitally transform. We find there is a shortfall in information around existing service costs and awareness of how changing service approaches, applications or technology components can impact the overall cost of ICT to the wider organisation. This information gap then limits the ability for ICT to be able to "pitch" to senior executives outside of ICT for more funds, showing the return on investment that a wide-scale change may provide.
These 3 examples can be difficult to fix and it's unlikely there is one solution that will fix all of the issues we've outlined here. However, we strongly recommend looking at forming a 3 year fully costed digital strategy that enables you to:
At CoStratify we realise it's not always easy to see the issues outlined above or understand the causes of them. It then can be even more difficult to put a plan in place to fix the core issues that ICT are having and align these strategically with what the wider organisation wants from ICT.
At CoStratify we help clients understand and fix the core issues within ICT. Our Roadmap service provides an excellent framework for this, as we know how to navigate each new issue that comes up on the path of change. If you're struggling in your quest towards alignment between what different stakeholders want from technology & digital strategies within your organisations and how this impacts change, then CoStratify can definitely help!