New Research: Only 5% of Large Companies Prepared to Meet IT Requirements of the New Digital Business

New Research: Only 5% of Large Companies
Prepared to Meet IT Requirements of the New Digital Business

Singapore – April
13, 2017

News
Summary:                             

·  71% of firms agree they will not be competitive
without IT Transformation

·  95% of survey respondents are falling behind an elite set of
competitors who are accelerating their digital business goals through IT
Transformation 

·  More mature organizations are 7X more likely to
recognize IT as competitive differentiator and profit center

·  96% of more mature organizations exceeded
revenue targets last year, more than 2X as likely to meet revenue goals

TWEET THIS: New @esg_global research: Only 5% prepared to meet IT requirements of new digital business

Full Story:

Dell
EMC announced the
results of a new study conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), which
revealed that a majority of senior IT leaders and decision-making managers of
large companies surveyed around the world indicate their organizations have yet
to fully embrace the aspects of IT Transformation needed to remain competitive.

While
there is a clear imperative for companies to transform their legacy IT, digital transformation is becoming the driving force to making IT
Transformation a top priority. However the ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity
Curve study commissioned
by Dell EMC shows 95% of survey respondents indicate their organizations are at
risk of falling behind a smaller group of industry peers that are transforming
their IT infrastructures, processes and delivery methods to accelerate their
goals of becoming digital businesses.

Many
organizations still measure application cycle times in months, if not years;
have siloed infrastructures; and continue to grapple with rigid legacy
architectures – all barriers to undertaking a successful digital
transformation.

“These
findings mirror how the vast majority of customers are telling us they need to
optimize their existing infrastructures to take advantage of digital-age
opportunities,” said David Goulden, President of Dell EMC.
“However, the research shows that most respondents are falling behind
a small and elite set of competitors who have cracked the IT Transformation
code, and they’re competing more vigorously because of it. As
organizations progress in their IT
Transformation investments, they can overcome the conflict
between legacy IT and digital business initiatives to realize their
goals, speed time to market and increase competitiveness.”

“As
organizations in the Asia Pacific and Japan region look at ways to reinvent
their business models to thrive in the digital age, an optimized IT
infrastructure that is agile and customer-focused is essential. The findings of
this research highlight the importance of organizations’ understanding where
they are today in terms of IT transformation maturity. This is a critical first
step to achieving their digital transformation goals,” said Paul Henaghan,
President, South Asia & Korea, Dell EMC.

The
ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve study was designed to understand the
role that IT Transformation plays toward becoming a digital business. ESG
employed a research-based, data-driven maturity model to identify different
stages of IT Transformation progress and determine the degree to which global
organizations have achieved those different stages, based on their responses to
questions about their organizations’ on-premise IT infrastructure, processes
and organizational alignment.

Based
on the global survey responses, the 1,000 participating organizations were
segmented into the following four IT Transformation maturity stages:

·  Stage 1 – Legacy (12%): falls short on many – if not all – of the
dimensions of IT Transformation in the ESG study

·  Stage 2 – Emerging (42%): showing progress in IT Transformation but
having minimal deployment of modern data center technologies

·  Stage 3 – Evolving (41%): showing commitment to IT
Transformation and having a moderate deployment of modern data center
technologies and IT delivery methods

·  Stage 4 – Transformed (5%): furthest along in IT Transformation
initiatives

The
majority of respondents (71%) agree that IT Transformation is essential to ongoing
business competitiveness. Of the “Transformed” companies, 85% believe their
organizations are in a “very strong” or “strong” position
to compete and succeed in their market over the next few years contrasted with
43% of the least mature companies.

The
“Transformed” organizations report the most progress in leveraging IT resources
to speed product innovation and time to market; automating manual processes and
tasks; and running IT as a profit center rather than a cost center. These
companies:

·         (96%) Exceeded revenue targets last year, more
than 2X the least mature

·         Are 8X more likely than the least mature
organizations to report a highly cooperative relationship between IT and the
business

·         Made “excellent progress” running IT as a profit center rather than a cost center (7X more
likely than the least mature)

·         Are 7X more likely than the least mature
organizations to have IT viewed by the business as a competitive differentiator

·         Leverage IT resources to speed product
innovation and time to market (6X more likely than the least mature
organizations)

According
to ESG, the adoption of modern data center technologies, such as scale-out
storage systems and converged/hyper-converged infrastructure, can improve the
agility and responsiveness of infrastructure provisioning, IT project delivery
and application development. The study found:

·  54% of all respondents use converged or
hyper-converged infrastructure to support applications

·  58% of all respondents have adopted scale-out
storage systems in some capacity

·  Roughly 50% of respondents are committed to
software-defined as a long-term strategy and have begun to implement, evaluate
or plan for software-defined technologies

According
to ESG, the adoption of modern IT processes – such as self-service provisioning
capabilities, running IT like a public cloud and use of DevOps methodologies –
can be an attribute of a successfully transformed company. The study found:

·  26% of all respondents have “extensive” or “established”
self-service capabilities

·  65% of all respondents have made “excellent” or
“acceptable” progress toward providing end users with the same ability to
provision IT resources that they can get from a public cloud provider

·  43% of respondents claim “extensive” or “good”
adoption of formal DevOps principles and best practices

IT Transformation is
often correlated with a more cooperative and effective relationship between IT
and the business, which was validated by the research. The study found:

·  36% of IT organizations and their outcomes are
evaluated by the C-suite or board of directors monthly, and 38% are evaluated
quarterly

·  39% have the most senior IT executive reporting
directly to the CEO

·  61% of the least mature organizations indicate
their line of business stakeholders view IT as a “stable service provider, but
ultimately a cost center”

At Dell EMC World in May 2017, experts will explore IT
Transformation and how it enables organizations to achieve their digital
transformation goals.

Supporting Quotes:

John McKnight, Vice
President of Research and Analyst Services, Enterprise Strategy Group

“Companies today
increasingly rely on technology to grow and improve all aspects of their
business. However, ESG’s research found that fully ‘Transformed’ IT
organizations are admittedly rare at this time. The good news is that there are
incremental benefits to be had by making any progress along the maturity curve,
which can be achieved by emulating the behaviors of these ‘Transformed’
organizations.”

Adam DeMattia, Director
of Research, Enterprise Strategy Group

“Legacy IT is largely
unprepared to meet the requirements of the new digital business: application
cycle times measured in months, if not years; siloed infrastructure that
prohibits organizations from viewing their data holistically; performance
bottlenecks that impact end-user experience in a world that demands constant
availability and response times; rigid architectures that force organizations
to make forklift upgrades as requirements change; and traditional provisioning
processes in which IT is often seen as a barrier rather than an enabler for the
business. Organizations must resolve this conflict between Digital
Transformation goals and today’s IT reality if the business is to meet its
ultimate objectives.”

Anthony Griffiths,
Technology Solutions Unit, Forest Fire Management, Victoria, Australia

“Critical emergency
services such as attending to frequent bushfires, requires real-time, agile,
and resilient platforms.  A foundation that has these characteristics is
imperative for our business to meet its digital transformation goals. While
focused on modernizing infrastructure, increasing performance and securing our
services; We also spent time reviewing internal processes and organizational
relationships to enable the transformation to DevOps. As a result, our
government agency is a “digital supermart” of sorts; one that is agile,
flexible, innovative, user-oriented, and customer-focused.”

About Dell EMC IT
Transformation Maturity Curve Study

The Dell EMC-sponsored
research was conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group between Dec. 9, 2016, and
Jan. 5, 2017, with a web-based survey of 1,000 senior IT executives,
decision-making managers and staff familiar with their organizations’ current
and future IT budget and spending plans and involved in their organizations’
infrastructure purchase processes in the U.S., Brazil, the United Kingdom,
Germany, France, China, Japan and Australia. The respondents represented a
variety of industries and enterprise-class organizations.