The path for transforming an organization must be uniquely aligned with the specific realities it faces, while ensuring that the business doesn’t fall behind the competition in today’s hypercompetitive climate. Staying current is essential, as the pace of change increases every day. There is no cookie-cutter approach that works across the board. Key technology platforms that drive digital transformation must offer the choices and options necessary to migrate in the least disruptive and most beneficial manner. The pressure to act now is intense, and choosing platforms with more options supports faster transformation. Empowering technology and IT professionals with flexible platforms stretching from the data center to the endpoint―that are low cost and secure and deliver substantial productivity gains in real time―is the best way forward.
Ensuring your organization can move quickly to prosper in a rapidly changing market is essential. A critical decision point for enabling transformation that provides competitive advantage is choosing a technology platform that has the greatest number of partners supporting or contributing to it. Simply put, more partners provide more options, eliminating dead ends. With more partners, critical new features arrive more quickly to enable faster transformation.
Best-in-class technology providers invest in large and truly capable partner networks that stretch from products that act as building blocks to partners that can design, deploy and operate the resulting IT infrastructure―all of which is critical to a customer’s success. Using a partner allows your internal IT team to focus on key elements of projects utilizing the best skills and expertise. This flexibility allows you to find the right balance to fit your needs, both now and in the future.
Another aspect of creating and executing the right pace and plan for transformation is to focus on solutions that offer true scalability and flexibility. Most of the discussion around flexibility focuses on scale-up of more demanding workloads, yet the reality is that scale-down when workloads become less demanding is just as important in delivering optimal cost efficiency. Not all technology platforms provide this two-way flexibility. And the platform must support scale-up utilizing both internal data center resources and a wide range of cloud services. Some platforms are focused on cloud only, which is a very real limitation.
The third aspect of providing IT with more choices, enabling the organization to determine its own transformation plan, is providing choices to end users, enabling them to deliver transformative services and products. Employees, contractors and gig workers are often driving digital transformation at a granular level. These teams move quickly, and it is essential to support them with both timely IT solutions and the many options they desire.
However, when the digital infrastructure of the organization cannot support these new initiatives due to complexity, security issues or the inability to easily support new devices and apps, it acts as a deterrent or bottleneck and the pace of change is greatly slowed. The digital transformation platform must provide the choices end users want and IT needs. These include:
- Support for new and emerging devices and apps soon after they become available
- Real-time creation of secure project teams composed of employees, contractors and partners
- Strong and documented data/information security that protects the organization from legal and compliance issues, yet still lets teams get their work done
Digital transformation platforms must support the real pace of transformation, determined by the specific realities of each organization, not the predetermined functionality of an IT vendor’s products. Providing a range of choices from the endpoint to the data center is critical to having a cohesive strategic platform that supports the unique journey of each company at the speed necessary in today’s dynamic environment. Success is enhanced when the technology platform is augmented by the products and services of a broad range of partners, allowing IT teams to find their own unique best fit.
