Enterprises now see technology as a fundamental driver of growth rather than as merely an enabling function. IT leaders are getting increasingly involved in major enterprise decision-making and powering transformative initiatives. Often, they are responsible for driving these changes across the operational landscape of businesses in all sectors as well as in defining new-age customer experiences. Technology is now the backbone, central nervous system, and the brains of modern enterprises. No wonder, this is a top focus area of enterprise investment. For instance, Gartner estimates that worldwide IT spending will surpass USD 5.06 trillion in 2024.
The rapid and dynamic nature of the business landscape as well as ever-evolving customer preferences require enterprises to accelerate the growth of their technology prowess in sync with their ambitions of business growth. However, these are complex projects with a lot of moving parts that need to work together in exactly the right fashion. In fact, studies show the failure rate of large transformation projects across enterprises is as large as 70%. This should come as a warning for leaders.
Clearly, it takes more than skills to address enterprise challenges today.
The challenges
Let us explore the top challenges that enterprises face today which necessitate a deeper rethinking of their strategy toward technology adoption:
Upskilling and new skills
The nature of digital experiences that customers demand today requires advanced levels of technology development, customization, and continuous improvement cycles. As technologies like AI, IoT, and new cloud paradigms emerge, enterprises will need to understand how to leverage them most appropriately. Hence the level of skills needed by tech teams will always have to cross a high bar. This necessitates a cycle of learning practices and continuous skill improvement for employees handling these initiatives. However, businesses often struggle to offer a dedicated growth and learning path for their tech employees because that isn’t their core business. Over time, these businesses struggle to hire, engage, train, and retain people interested in core technology careers. And devising technical training programs, fostering continuous learning, accommodating market trends and other core tech skill behaviors may not be feasible continuously. Soon enough, this creates shortages of people with the skills and tech attitude required to power new initiatives.
Standardized processes
As technology begins to scale in volume and importance, businesses need to design and adopt a standardized approach to building services around the technology core. For this, they need well-defined processes that ensure optimized performance, business continuity, and intelligent monitoring and trackability. They need a baseline organizational framework of processes that will always allow a smooth flow of data and insights. These processes must remain functional even in the event of any people or operational challenges. This is because data will become key to driving powerful decision systems as well as innovations in emerging technologies and digital business models.
However, the creation of such processes requires a strategic approach wherein core business objectives must be mapped into the required operational workflows and then subsequently into technology solutions that streamline them. Achieving such standardization in processes will be difficult for enterprises without a deep understanding of the domain, technology, and business processes.
Picking the right tools
A great deal of technology investments go into leveraging a diverse range of software platforms and tools that are used by different stakeholders in the business. If we take a closer look at the market, there are thousands of vendors for software in every category. Without proper guidance and support, it will be nearly impossible for enterprises to arrive at the right choice of tools to use in their business.
As the technology ecosystem evolves, there will also be a need to set up an ecosystem of tools, processes, and operational workflows to enable users to leverage maximum ROI from the tools the business adopts. Putting this together is also another challenge given the need to balance business objectives and cost constraints.
Continuous innovation
As new market challenges emerge, they need to continuously evolve their underlying technology strategy. This is a race to beat the competition to find and fulfill meaningful customer demands. However, this will involve continuous experimentation with emerging technologies. Look at the firestorm of activity around generative AI for a clue pointing to how this will pan out in the future.
For an enterprise, such an adaptive technology infrastructure can only be built if they have a culture of continuous technological innovation. Unfortunately, most non-tech businesses, do not have the time, skills, processes, or resource muscle to nurture this culture.
Solving the enterprise dilemma
As is apparent, many of the core challenges that today’s enterprises face in terms of their technology prowess stem from the fact that they are forced to depend too much on their internal IT to power innovations. Clearly though, achieving the necessary speed, scale, agility, and resilience with an in-house technology team is simply not sustainable.
In the long run, with this approach, it will become impossible to sustain the pace of innovation and market competence needed to survive and grow the business in ways that customers will love. Building a digital-first business experience is critical to success and gaining a strategic edge in this direction will require more than just hiring people with an identified set of technical skills.
Businesses need a strategic partnership with a technology organization like Trinus. Such a partnership will ensure that an experienced set of eyes prepares the business’s digital transformation roadmap. With trusted development frameworks, internationally recognized standards, and a quest for innovation across various technologies, Trinus will ensure that your enterprise always has what it takes to beat market challenges. Get in touch with us to know more.