What's holding organizations back from successful enterprise modernization?
Despite the appetite for progress, IT leaders attest that existing modernization initiatives aren’t delivering the expected results. Here’s a look at a few of the common issues:
1. Keeping up with emerging technologies is a struggle.
AI and automation are evolving at an unprecedented rate, with new tools entering the market every day. Staying on the cutting edge demands considerable investment and maximum agility, but only 29% of IT leaders claim their organizations are at the forefront of data, analytics, and machine learning.
2. Migrations are long, expensive, and slow to deliver.
Migrations are central to modernization, but completing them is often hugely disruptive and expensive. 72% of IT leaders say system migration projects take longer than planned, while 75% of cloud migrations run over budget. With such prolonged and complex migration processes, the anticipated ROI can be elusive.
3. AI implementation is proving harder than expected.
The advent of mainstream AI has caused 93% of organizations to reevaluate their digital systems. But only 25% of employees say AI is actually improving efficiency, indicating that it’s not a straight line from implementation to improvement. On top of that, over a quarter of IT leaders are concerned about data availability and quality.
4. There are disconnects between what IT knows and what the business knows
Effective modernization can only happen through effective collaboration between the business and its IT department. But more often than not, there are silos and knowledge gaps on both sides. Knowledge silos exist in 83% of companies, and 97% of workers say silos harm their business. This is certainly the case for many modernization initiatives. IT teams have siloed knowledge within their function, while business teams have siloed knowledge within their function, making it hard to work together well.
This incomplete picture leads to unforeseen issues and missed opportunities during modernization.
5. Modernizations are shaped by vendor decrees, rather than by business needs.
Many enterprises fall into the trap of flexing their modernization approach in line with the limitations or demands of their system and application vendors, instead of prioritizing their own organizational needs. This results in an ill-fitting approach that doesn’t effectively scale or adapt as your business grows and evolves.
Composability — that is, the ability to flex, add to, retool, and rearrange IT infrastructure to fit with evolving business needs — is a huge priority for modern CIOs, and rigid vendor rules clash with it. This rigidity may even be holding companies back from revenue gains: per Gartner, high-composability enterprises can expect greater revenue increases than low-composability enterprises.
