A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
Leo Wong
Undoubtedly, enterprises across many industries are starting to jump on the bandwagon of digital transformation. But how do you “do digital transformation” effectively? What are some of the biggest challenges of digital transformation and are you overpaying for digital transformation consulting services? If you struggle to see results or are overwhelmed by the cost of numerous consultants, what is the one solution that has proven to have worked? This article will share some DevOps/Digital Transformation insights and offer an effective alternative.
Key challenges of digital transformation and DevOps
DevOps promised a perfect world: a world where everyone "builds it and runs it," a world where business-critical apps can be released in a significantly shorter time frame, and when they fail, they "fail fast." However, this perfect world has become a myth.
For a very small fraction of enterprises, it does turn into a reality. But more often than not, it only partially manifests. For instance, when apps are built using a CI/CD pipeline, but the process of provisioning the necessary infrastructure remains disjointed or manual. Here are 3 biggest challenges of digital transformation:
Digital transformation challenge #1: Lack of expertise
To implement digital transformation successfully, organizations and businesses need essential technical expertise. This may mean talents with specialized skills in areas such as cloud computing, data analytics, cybersecurity, DevOps, etc., but they also need to have in-depth knowledge of the company’s business and technological needs, limitations and resources. The lack of in-house expertise is a significant roadblock. That’s why, in many cases, companies will seek out “digital transformation consultants” to help.
But, if you seek to improve and hire a consultant who wears a US$5000 suit to help conduct an
"As-is" assessment to understand why, the answer you’d get is most likely some criticism about your organization not being "digitally transformed”.
What solutions do they suggest?
They will probably recommend an organizational change that breaks down the boundaries within your organization, leading to the dissolution of separate Apps, Infra, and Operations teams. Anticipating objections, they would then suggest forming a small trial team composed of individuals from various departments.
While this approach may result in some initial success, it raises questions from an organizational perspective.
Imagine this: previously, you had three teams. Now, you have four teams to manage. According to the consultant's plan, it will take years for your entire IT organization to undergo a complete transformation.
This approach ensures job security for everyone, but does it genuinely benefit your business?
Digital transformation challenge #2: Organizational structure
While a “task force” or trial team with different departments’ input sounds innovative, these different teams exist for specific, and separate reasons: the security team focuses on risk exposure, the infrastructure team monitors resource capacity, and the app team ensures prompt and correct execution of business requirements by the application. This division of responsibilities ensures a carefully balanced outcome across all aspects, leading to sustainable success.
The need for a solution is becoming increasingly urgent. The answer lies in a platform that spans all departments, offering a unified view while addressing the unique perspectives of different stakeholders.
In order to make it work, you may have to restructure your company, plan and create new training for staff, change roles, responsibilities, workflows and more. All of these substantial and, not to mention, extremely costly human resources experiments will disrupt the already-established work culture and processes. While this fluidity can be beneficial for some organizations, it will undoubtedly take a long time for any measurable profits and results to be seen. In the meantime, your market is rapidly changing, your customers are being offered many other better, faster options and you will be caught between a rock and a hard place. Should you continue with a costly organizational restructure without knowing whether it would succeed, or should you cut your losses and try something else? And that leads us to the next challenge – costs!
Digital transformation challenge #3: Budget constraints
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bottomless pocket and an endless supply of financial resources for trial and error? But, the reality is, that you would most likely face budget constraints that prevent you from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and months to transform a few aspects of your operations.
A recent survey of 600 senior IT decision-makers showed that enterprises, on average, planned to invest US$ 33 million in 12 months, from mid-2023 to mid-2024 for digital initiatives[2]. Digital transformation does not have to be an astronomical investment, but it is an expensive decision. We know - you cannot afford to delay digital transformation. But is there a way to achieve better business outcomes, e.g., quicker time to market, better customer experience, good governance, etc., without restructuring the whole organization or spending a fortune to test things out?
You Can Overcome Digital Transformation Challenges
The need for a solution is becoming increasingly urgent. The answer lies in a platform that spans all departments, offering a unified view while addressing the unique perspectives of different stakeholders.
By providing a common ground for everyone to contribute from their viewpoint, organizations can measure impact with unity, reach their end goals more efficiently and potentially reduce the reliance on consultants.
One last tip: There are many platform engineering tools available in the market that promise speedy delivery. However, very often, you may need additional investment in infrastructure standardization with these tools. Switching between different tools and interfaces could mean extra time and effort wasted, and it certainly means more errors.
So, look for a platform engineering tool and solution that combines application deployment with correspondence infrastructure. Now, with that, whether you are a team of 20 or 20,000, you can truly be highly scalable and can easily triple your DevOps efficiency without comprising good governance or increasing headcounts.
