by Alison DeNisco, ZDNet
VIDEO: Digital transformation: Eight unavoidable challenges for your business
Enterprises with lofty digital transformation goals must take caution: The road will not always be smooth, largely due to human behavior rather than the new technology itself.
“We’re at the cusp of trying to understand what digital is as an industry,” said Khalid Kark, managing director of Deloitte LLP, and director of research for Deloitte’s CIO Program. “We’re just starting to recognize the huge amount of impact digital will have. But we are not recognizing the enormity of the effort required to actually drive those front-end changes we want.”
Here are eight common challenges that arise during digital transformation projects, so you can be prepared to navigate any bumps in the road.
1. Organizational change
2. Security
3. Legacy systems
Legacy systems remain a large challenge for most enterprises, said Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter. “Almost every aspect of how a company does business today is built on the premise of how businesses worked in the last hundred years,” Solis said. “Any time innovation has forced businesses to make changes, they’ve invested in new tech as a means to adapt to that tech, but based on yesterday’s premises.”
4. Lack of clarity
5. The ‘digital iceberg’
6. Lack of digital literacy
A lack of C-suite understanding of the importance of making digital shifts can undermine many efforts, Solis said.
“Executives don’t often live the company the way employees and customers do, so their understanding of tech is done from an arm’s length,” Solis said. “They tend to see mobile and all of these new technologies much in the same way they saw the web when it first came along, asking: ‘Is this going to be a thing? Let’s limit our investment.’ It places them in dangerous territory.”
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