Driving Digital Transformation: 5 Steps to Achieving Data Maturity
Digital transformation is a hot topic and an initiative that most companies are striving to address. But what is it really, what are its main challenges and why does data maturity matter so much to its success?
Digital transformation is not a destination with a fixed endpoint, but rather a journey that will evolve over time. Many businesses confuse modernization projects — such as digitizing analog processes, accelerating existing workflows and migrating to the cloud — with digital transformation. While modernization is an important aspect of the digital transformation process, it’s not the end goal. An analog business is complex, and complexity doesn’t scale. A truly digital business is one that can achieve reach and differentiation at scale and grow frictionlessly.
There’s no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all approach. Each organization will have a digital vision that is unique to them, one that accounts for their own business objectives, values and specific market challenges and opportunities. However, there are some near-universal benefits that come from embarking on a journey to digital transformation. They include increased efficiency, better resource management, more relevant customer engagements, reduced time-to-market and increased revenue.
When it comes to digital transformation, there’s one ingredient all successful initiatives have in common — data. The ability to get the right data to the right people at the right time is what drives effective digital transformation. Improved customer service, increased operational efficiencies and enhanced innovation are just a few of the potential results. Beyond a shiny, new façade or front end, the real value of digital transformation comes from the quality of the data and the digital services it allows you to deliver.
Often we see organizations that do not plan their digital transformation effectively. The result? A patchwork of technologies and services, and more complexity and less agility than when they started. They also face the inability to deliver the compelling interaction and engagement that underpin successful digital transformations.
The road to value can be winding, with some businesses taking unintended detours. Digital transformation is central to the ability to manage data diversity and deploy sophisticated analytics. As data and analytics efforts become more mature over time, they employ more diverse data and enable more sophisticated analytics. To modernize their data and analytics infrastructures, most organizations have either moved to the cloud or are planning to move to the cloud, often as part of a multi-cloud deployment. For example, in a recent IDC survey, nearly 80% of participating organizations reported storing more than half of their data in hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Informatica and DataIQ explored the digital transformation journey of over 100 organizations to understand how they were progressing, why some were speeding ahead while others were moving at a slower pace, and the many ways they were leveraging digital transformation to drive greater business value.
The world has recently faced a series of major disruptions — from the Covid-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine. Such events send shock waves across the globe, resulting in sudden and major changes. These include rapid shifts to online consumer interactions and transactions, the realignment of value chains to remove bottlenecks and, for many businesses, increases in remote working, resulting in the reduction of physical footprints.
To support these changes, many organizations have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives and pivoted to a digital-first approach. Companies that have reached data maturity are in a far better position to pivot quickly and manage these disruptions through accurate data-driven decisions.
