Is Your Network Ready for Digital Transformation?

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the digital world for business. According to IDC, over 60% of GDP around the world will be digitized by 2022, and every sector and industry will be driven by digital operations, relationships, and growth.

As a result, getting your organization ready for digital transformation is one of the most important things businesses can do right now. However, ensuring that your IT architecture is truly digital-ready can be a challenging task, and plenty of companies struggle to define exactly what they need to do.

IT leaders and senior management have to embrace digital transformation if they do not want to get left behind in a growing trend toward innovation and technological advancement. But even if your IT department has begun researching digital transformation, speaking to the right people about strategies, and finding ways to use new tech like machine learning and AI, if your organization as a whole is not ready, it may all be in vain.

Preparing your network for digital transformation isn’t about technology. Or rather, it isn’t just about technology. Dealing with the technical side of things is, to be honest, the easy part. The true test of an organization’s digital readiness is its organizational structure.

Firstly, to be truly ready for digital transformation, an organization has to be able to think digitally. Digital strategy has to be an integral part of the business’s forward planning, and digital thinking should be a part of every leader’s skill set, not just delegated to the IT department. The organization must be able to see and accept digital transformation at every level and in every aspect of the business - a holistic approach is vital. Having the culture and the mindset in place to really understand digital transformation could be the difference between success and failure.

Secondly, your organizational architecture has to be able to demonstrate a certain number of qualities in order to be able to successfully transform into a digital enterprise. Digital readiness begins at an operational level, so ensuring that your business is sustainable and disciplined operationally is vital. Digital transformation requires an organization to be agile, both in terms of its strategic aims (knowing when to pivot) and in terms of its operating model, being able to quickly adapt to the fast pace of digital change. Finally, a business must be prepared to embrace disruption, and nurture a disruptive culture, to ensure that this process is not a one-off, and to allow ongoing transformation.

Of course, IT architecture and the right technology are important aspects of transformation preparation too. Have a digital roadmap or strategy, starting with what you want to achieve and working backward toward the technology you need. Your IT infrastructure should be able to handle the outcomes and goals that you have identified, as well as be flexible and evolutionary enough to respond as these outcomes and goals change. In fact, ensuring that your IT infrastructure is constantly evolving to take advantage of technological innovations is one of the best ways to start your digital transformation process. Making sure that you can take advantage of things like machine learning, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and cybersecurity will put you in a good position to enact a positive digital transformation.

A few things to think about when you are assessing how ready you are as an organization for digital transformation:

• Does your organization’s strategic vision or road map support your digital transformation journey?
• Can your current network architecture deliver lower costs, fewer risks, and speedier innovation for your customers?
• Are you getting enough analysis from your network to enable continuous transformation?
• Can the business ecosystem in which you work, including your partners and service providers, help you evolve your network to become digital-ready?
• Is your IT architecture ready? Do you support end-to-end automation, the cloud, virtualization, Big Data, IoT, and mobile?
• Do you have sufficient cybersecurity in place?

When it comes to digital transformation, for most small and medium businesses, the most sensible pathway is to work with a managed IT services provider. A good MSP will be able to work with your organization from start to finish implementing best practices, providing the necessary networks, infrastructure and architecture to make it a success, and helping you put IT at the heart of everything your business does with strategic planning and road-mapping.

To learn more about preparing for digital transformation and to learn how to ensure your IT architecture is optimized to ensure continuous success, get in touch with VC3. Our team of experts will be able to provide you with all the information you will need and give you advice and support throughout the process.