Businesses are not in sync with their IT departments

Dae.mn, a consultancy that helps businesses to get the most out of technology, have revealed in their latest study that there is a glaring disparity between IT decision makers and non IT decision makers.

Dae.mn are technology consultants to the likes of Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Superdry and SpecSavers, while also working with big public sector organisations such as the Home Office. They also partner with the likes of AWS, HashiCorp and Atlassian to deliver projects that range from cloud migration, DevOps, and AI / ML.

Their recent study found that although almost all respondents (94%) agree that the speed of digital transformation (DX) has accelerated in 2021, decision makers outside of IT departments did not recognise the extent of change.

Just 35% believe they have fully implemented their digital transformation strategy.

Disconnect around technological implementation

Canvassing the opinions of 200 decision makers, across a range of industries including retail, manufacturing, financial services, professional services, energy, media and leisure in Q3 of 2021, found that 58% of respondents say that their organisation is only in the very early stages of implementing their digital transformation strategy, or has only partially implemented it.  

Selected findings:

• 79% of ITDMs agree that they have undergone significant DevOps adoption, compared to 61% of non-ITDMS
• 79% of ITDMs agree that they have undergone significant adoption of cloud services, compared to 58% of non-ITDMS 
• 80% of ITDMs agree that they have undergone significant data analytics adoption, compared to just 42% of non-ITDMS. 

Digital transformation worth trillions

A recent report from IDC has predicted that direct digital transformation will total over $6.8 trillion between 2020 and 2023. With the the speed of DX investments and implementations accelerating, ITDMs are struggling to demonstrate the impact of DX, even though 92% of respondents consider “proving business value of IT services” a high or top priority.  

Speaking on the figures, Calum Fitzgerald, Co-Founder of Dae.mn, said that “these revelations come at a time where businesses rely more on technology to streamline operations, as a point of differentiation, or even just to function at a basic level than ever before."

"As a result, demonstrating ROI has never been more important, but is clearly proving difficult. If decision makers outside of IT are struggling to see the impact that investment is having, especially whilst technology is playing a pivotal role, then this could be down to internal communication.”  

Fitzgerald went on to add: “Ultimately the solution lies in making sure that the objectives are agreed upon in the preliminary stages of any digital transformation project, and that they are measurable. Additionally, allowing leadership across the entire organisation to maintain visibility over digital transformation and communicating with them in terms that they will understand is crucial in mollifying any concerns that they may over budgets, implementation, or general disruption.”