IBS Journal November 2015
Digital transformation: radical but essential
The development of inter-company and company-client relationships to a digital-based model can only strengthen the strategic importance of CIOs in the coming years, argues Stéphane Yeou, an associate partner with Paris-based management consulting firm Julhiet SterWen.
This change is of course induced by the acceleration of digital channels and digital media as a form of communication and interaction. Thisis a perfectly exogenous phenomenon resulting from players in the technology industry constantly renewing their offerings. Customers are adopting this at an
increasing speed. They import this culture either as customers or as employees to oth- er industries. In this context, companies born in the digital age have a significant advantage to compete withother players (viz. ‘brick and mortar’) in their industry. They have no legacy to be transformed
in terms of information systems and asso- ciated complexities and costs; so they can easily deliver the promise of ‘omnichannel’ customer experiences that only very few players (if any) can genuinely claim today. CIOs must transform or else jeopard-
ise the very existence of their organisation. But if in recent years they have undertaken significant transformation projects to pro- fessionalise their services while optimising production costs, the digital transformation in its scale and complexity is unprecedent- ed: some players speak of an investment of 2% of the company’s turnover in five years.
Digital – a complete business transformation
Digital – from a strictly technological stand- point – is the creation of new products and services to capture new prospects, enrich the customer experience through enhanced privacy and to facilitate interac- tions and collaborations within a company. It induces a complete transformation of the company, its modes of operation, management and culture requiring close co-ordination between the digital roadmap of trade and that of the CIO.
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Digital – a clear guideline for the CIO
According to a study by Gartner (December 2014), 51% of CIOs believe that digitalisation arrives faster than they anticipated and 42% of CIOs feel they do not have the skills and capacities in place to deal with these changes in the near future. In view of the many possible scenarios as a guideline for the transformation, one of them stands out: building a‘two-speed’ IT
architecture.This includes structuring the company’s entire CIO capabilities (organisa- tion, human and physical assets) as follows:
1. A computer set-up capable of meeting short development cycles: facing the customer experience (new client fea- tures), multi-platform (desktops, tablets, smartphones etc), behaviour analy- sis (connected objects, big data). It is characterised by the development of methods called ‘fast’ and ‘co-designed’, to lay the design bases on successful case studies. It is imperative to leave the traditional framework of computational methods and extend to the use of envi- ronment at large: the classic approach of ‘designers’ of things, for example.
2. A computer-centered transactional operation between the ‘client’ lay- er (managed by the previous IT) and traditional applications and infrastruc- ture. This computer is designed to deliver the highest availability, reliabil- ity and robustness to its internal cus- tomers. It notably includes the rede- sign of projects or transfer of existing IT assets (so-called ‘legacy’). We qualify this set-up as ‘hybrid’ rather than ‘two- speed’as it seems more positive.
© IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com IT Hybrid Digital Model
The IT Digital Hybrid Model depicted
above defines the main guidelines and their implications.
Pillar 1: The IT Infrastructure
Radical transformation of the existing work environment and IT infrastructure. Historically, the IT department has
provided services to company employees. Users access applications and data from ‘standard’ workstations provided by their IT. The data travels over the company network with dedicated infrastructure (private data centres), controlled volume, performance, and sizing the networks. The levels of relat- ed services are defined principles. Comput- er security is based on a model called the ‘castle’ as per which the threat comes from outside the company. With the arrival of digital, the work
environment is undergoing radical trans- formation. Now, the information systems must be accessible by business users (employees) but also externally (clients and prospects) from different and varied plat- forms (desktops, tablets, smartphones etc). The volume of data has exploded and
standardised infrastructure now com- bines private data centres and the cloud. The security threat has shifted: not only does it focus on networks and access to
analysis: digital transformation
IT Infrastructure
Governance
Capabilities
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