IT leaders today are under a multitude of pressures, for example Increasing customer demands for better digital products and services, competitive pressures from disruptive organizations, achieving greater speed to market and innovation, keeping up with the latest developments and need to be flexible enough to adapt.
To combat these pressures, IT leaders need to continually digitally transform and challenge the way they do things. However, transformation initiatives demand significant effort.
Digital transformation efforts can be divided into four core areas for growth and change: Experience, Cultural, Business and Operational. All of these should be considered when embarking on an overall digital change programme.
Transforming the customer experience
One of the core areas, Experience Transformation, is about enhancing the customer experience when interacting with products and services. Think of banking apps that work with fingerprint scanners or facial recognition.
The principal barrier to achieving this transformation is that most businesses are not yet ready for this kind of change.
But what does this mean?
Transformation challenges
Digital transformation could be considered a “hype” which can lead to confusion about what it means. This can result in having to admit that you don’t have the necessary early adopters in your business who are open to change, who can make use of digital capabilities. There is no point in producing technology if nobody can use it.
Equally, the digital transformation might not be relevant to every business or division/department. If you are not able to define how digital transformation relates to your business model, how can you ensure that you can transform your customers’ experience?
The danger is that businesses start to invest in “shiny” new applications. But if they do this in isolation and don’t think about the desired business outcomes then this could be a failed investment and will not help with your customers’ overall experience.
Some businesses underestimate what’s required for digital transformation efforts. This could be their technological deficiencies but also a lack of the right resources and skills. As discovered in the recent ITSM benchmarking survey from AXELOS, while 59% of businesses have a digital transformation strategy in place, skills shortages and legacy systems are a clear barrier to success. Therefore, the change could become an overwhelming challenge and lead to an even less competitive business.
How ITIL 4 helps prepare businesses for digital transformation
ITIL is the most widely recognized framework for IT-enabled services in the world and aims to help IT and digital teams meet the increasing demands from their customers while helping services remain stable and effective. It is utilised by 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
ITIL 4, the latest update to ITIL, has evolved this well-established framework to meet the challenges of the modern digital world. It reshapes established ITIL practices into the wider context of customer experience, value streams, and digital transformation, as well as embracing new ways of working, such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps to enable faster and more efficient service delivery.
Customers are an essential element in the process of creating value in ITIL 4. The framework helps candidates to integrate optimization of new technology into their working methods and provides the fundamental skills needed for organizational change. It helps organizations to continually improve the way they work, and the services and experiences provided to customers.
Find out more about ITIL 4 here.