If you aren’t quicker and smarter than your competition when it comes to talent acquisition, time to market, and customer feedback loops, your business is going to start suffering eventually.

This is what a digital transformation is all about. It isn’t for the wimps. It is an ongoing technical, organizational, procedural, financial, and cultural challenge.

Back to Front

Digital transformation is something which needs to be end-to-end. It cannot just be something for marketing or finance or HR to do in isolation. These processes are generic to most organizations, and when they are run on legacy applications, they can get really expensive to upgrade or maintain, especially when highly customized. Moving them to a shared cloud service can help improve efficiency and savings. They will also accelerate the ability of a company to innovate.

The main payoff, however, comes when the company can tie in their front and back end applications and connect them with infrastructure, sensor-laden devices, machines, etc. to get real-time feedback.

What’s in the way?

Not all CIOs are moving at the same speed when it comes to digital transformations. One common problem here is that companies tend to begin the journey in decentralized ways. This results in various uncoordinated journeys. By the time they start putting the pieces together, it becomes very disruptive since they do not fit together.

Modern CIOs recognize they don’t need to be managing IT anymore and are moving to manage business processes instead.

Evolution of CIO

The role of the CIO is evolving. The CIOs used to be almighty and build and maintain infrastructure, guard the data, control permissions, and introduce new technology themselves. But today, smart CIOs are the ones in power. They own digital transformations. Depending on the size of the organization, they are evolving at a slow or rapid pace.

There are three obstacles to this transformation:

Emotional

The feeling of loss of ownership and control. There were major concerns for security, and allowing third parties to guard the keys to the kingdom. These concerns are no longer prevalent though as customers gain a better understanding of security controls which are available in the cloud.

The industry and country-specific regulations

Cloud providers respond with some creative solutions which offer customers services in the cloud which are integrated into systems which reside on the premises of a company. Cloud providers even build data centers in various countries so that customers don’t have to worry about performance or country-specific restrictions.

Inertia

Companies have spent a lot of money on their complex IT infrastructure including millions of dollars’ worth of customization. Replacing them requires buy-ins and significant realignment.

The Biggest Reason

But, of all the reasons why organizations need to embrace the cloud, the most crucial one has got to be speed. Most companies spend a very small part of their budget on IT, and the cost savings offered by the cloud is fascinating. Accessing the speed at which innovation takes place can change this, though.

Companies need to start reacting to change at a quicker speed than they did earlier. This is what the cloud offers. Speed to change things quicker than competitors.