Today’s business leaders realise the importance of digital transformation to future-proof their organisations and succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Digital technology can help businesses drive performance, improve customer experience and lead their industries. However, while it may be essential for business growth, it is no small undertaking—it requires organisation-wide commitment and significant investment in digital capabilities and technology.
Digital transformation brings considerable benefits. For example, businesses collect vast amounts of data from many different sources, and data analytics can improve decision making, enhance customer satisfaction, increase efficiency and mitigate risk. Digital technology has also enabled businesses to reinvent the way they work through solutions that ensure business continuity, productivity, and security across a hybrid workplace.
According to McKinsey & Company, the response to COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of digital transformation by several years. Yet, a 2020 study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reveals that a staggering 70% of transformation efforts fail to reach their goals. There are many factors that businesses need to get right to improve their chances of success. These can range from strategy and technology to infrastructure; however, according to BCG, the people dimension (organisational design, operating model, processes, and culture) is often the most critical determinant of success.
Many business leaders point to a lack of skills as one of the key impediments to transformation. Unsurprisingly, given the scope, speed, and scale of technological transformation, Gartner reports that many organisations struggle even to identify what skills they need to execute digital initiatives, let alone build these capabilities. As a result, many companies simply do not have the right mix of skills and expertise to drive new thinking, keep abreast of technology changes and execute a successful transformation. What’s more, digital skills are in high demand and are difficult to find, and it can be costly and time-consuming to source, develop and retain the right talent and create a digitally-driven culture.
It makes sense for organisations that want to kickstart their digital transformation to consider working strategically with external partners who can provide expertise across a wide range of business and technology requirements.
Enhancing capabilities through strategic partnerships
Working with the right partners can help organisations improve customer experience, create significant value, and drive their businesses forward. A specialised partner can help companies position their transformation efforts for success by utilising new digital technologies, employing best practices, and managing risk around governance, compliance, cybersecurity, and data privacy. Through these relationships, companies can gain access to an exhaustive range of skills and expertise and rapidly enhance their capabilities.
Outsourcing offers flexibility—IT support can be scaled up or down to meet business demands. For example, individuals or teams with specialised skills can be brought in for specific tasks and projects and get to work right away, or companies can bring in dedicated resources on a full-time basis. This can help to level the playing field for small businesses by enabling them to deliver complex solutions and compete with much larger enterprises. Moreover, agile teams of specialists can be built quickly, allowing organisations to capture value and innovate faster and more efficiently, which in turn drives competitive advantage.
Teaming up with trusted partners not only helps to fill gaps and drive transformation programmes at speed—external providers can add resources to reduce workloads and free up employees from the management of day-to-day IT operations to focus on core business priorities.
Digital transformation begins with the development of a clearly defined business strategy supported by a flexible business model. iOCO’s team of management consultants and technical experts can help organisations navigate their business transformation, develop an integrated strategy and translate it into action. iOCO’s consultative approach focuses on understanding its customers’ evolving business challenges and advising on the right technology to enable their strategy, manage costs, and deliver business value.
iOCO has a strategic partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Together, they offer experienced on-demand resources with deep technical capabilities across a complete portfolio of solutions provided as-a-Service. Their breadth of services can help companies bridge capabilities gaps that could hamper transformational efforts.
Everything-as-a-Service
IT services are at the centre of digital transformation. Shifting from a traditional IT delivery model to a flexible consumption model, like HPE’s GreenLake, can significantly transform the IT landscape while reducing costs and speeding up innovation.
HPE GreenLake is a platform for delivering the entire IT solution to businesses as-a-Service—or Everything-as-a-Service. HPE GreenLake allows organisations to select the solutions that make sense for their business, have these delivered swiftly and pay only for what they use with no initial outlay, which frees up cash flow. Transitioning IT spending away from upfront capital expenditure (CapEx) to a more predictable operating expenditure (OpEx) model means CIOs don’t have to wait for technology refresh cycles to modernise their infrastructure. A pay-as-you-go consumption-based model means businesses work with external partners to enable flexible, services-oriented IT and provide the agility they need to innovate and grow faster. In addition, fully managed cloud services can reduce the burden of IT operations and free up resources.
In traditional environments, it’s difficult to predict what capacity will be required in the future. As a result, many organisations over-provision, spending way more than necessary on compute and storage to be on the safe side. With HPE GreenLake, spending is aligned with IT consumption which reduces costs and improves forecasting. iOCO and HPE’s specialists work with businesses to assess their immediate and projected capacity requirements and then install, monitor and manage the infrastructure on their behalf.
Capacity—servers, storage, compute, networking, etc.—can be quickly scaled up or down according to demand, ensuring the infrastructure can grow and evolve with the organisation. HPE uses metering and active capacity management to ensure organisations only pay for what they use while affording CIOs complete visibility and granularity into usage and costs.
Services to support a digital future
As a result of the pandemic, today’s top business priorities include improving continuity and resiliency, increasing operational efficiency and agility, speeding innovation, and boosting analytics capabilities. However, when it comes to digital transformation, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. That’s why developing an ecosystem of carefully selected partners with the knowledge and expertise to support these goals and deliver solutions optimised for different businesses and their unique challenges can pave the way for a successful transformation.
iOCO brings the people, skills, tools, and competencies to smooth operations, mitigate risk, boost service delivery, and simplify IT management. Our comprehensive range of services includes:
- Enterprise managed services
- Storage, backup, and disaster recovery (DR) delivered as-a-Service
- Cloud managed services
- Private cloud data centre hosting
- Security-as-a-Service
- AI-driven IT automation and optimisation
- Networking-as-a-Service
- End-user managed services
If you are interested in discovering how iOCO can mobilise, deliver, and support your business with technologies and outsourced managed services that meet your unique business needs, please contact us.
By Dilip Chhiba, Services Executive Compute & Platform