Today Chris Howard, Head of Research at Gartner, shared his insights on the current state of digital transformation (DX). At the annual DX convention and awardshosted by IT World Canada,
He recalled that his grandfather, when the first automobile appeared in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in 1915, had been skeptical. In 1922 he ended up buying one, then, a few years later, he established the first automobile-powered postal route in southwestern NS, replacing oxen, horse-drawn carts, and slaves that delivered mail to that point. Was.
That’s the journey organizations are navigating right now, he explained, adding, “It’s a combination of all the trends that are real today, to a point that you can’t imagine they weren’t there before.”
The pandemic has given a jolt to the system, forcing us to re-evaluate the choices we made about how we worked, how decisions were made and how technology was deployed, we are now thinking that we might not be in office all the time, he said. Come back.
But there is a process of experimentation leading up to that point, and leaders are feeling pressure to stabilize innovations and reach the implementation stage, Howard explained.
ChatGPT is one example where we see increased investment and expectation that AI is going to deliver results, but a lot of hard work remains to be done.
Getting to that point of implementation can start with you, though, he told attendees.
“I want you to be the well-known person on the subject [generative AI] Within your enterprise, because it’s hard to understand, and you need to have people who are helping your organization understand what the use cases are, prioritize them, and then put them into practice. It’s moving so fast and you need to stay on top of it.”
Howard said, but DX “has never been so cut and dried”, adding that “there’s a dark reality here that we’ve been exposed to over the past year.”
Some surveys Gartner conducted with CFOs and CEOs show that “a little bit of fatigue is coming,” he said, noting that 81 percent of them responded that they’re not seeing that kind of change. Which they expected from the investment. Make
As a result, CFOs, for example, are paying more attention to returns, meaning they want to establish the types of value-adds they want to create by investing. Or it could mean that they are focusing on smaller scale investments to generate more rapid returns.
The language is also changing from “digital transformation” to “business transformation,” meaning that digital components are part of a broader strategy.
“What this means for you is that you need to be really great at converting the technological innovations you see into business results.”
Howard believes there are six things you should focus on to accomplish this:
- People – What do you do with your new employees – convert them to the way the company operates, or use their fresh thinking to help transform the company from the inside out?
- Technology innovation, such as the use of AI and ML – assess use cases where these technologies are really paying off
- Acquisition – Take into account the time it will take to realize the value of the acquisition.
- Business Model – Build an ecosystem of partners to help create new types of value
- Data – harness and model the plethora of data stored in your environment to generate better business results
- to compute Experimenting and moving to the public cloud is one type of computing advancement. Quantum is another, especially for hard, multivariate problems, such as designing better batteries for energy storage. Quantum is one of those advances that is going to happen all of a sudden and will be available all of a sudden, he said. Now is the time to start experimenting and simulating.
