Clearing Three Hurdles to Digital Transformation
Being a midsize business has its benefits. Your business has more power to invest than lean startups do and more freedom to innovate than giant corporations do. Getting the most out of these advantages depends on having the right tools and partnerships that help your business scale and thrive.
While the global pandemic has pushed many risk-averse midsize companies to accelerate their digital transformation, there’s more to implementing a transformation strategy than quickly introducing the newest technology.
Three major hurdles still hinder 94% of midsize organizations from achieving meaningful digital transformation: getting the right data insights, keeping data private and secure, and having sufficient financial resources.
But partnering with an engaged and experienced information technology (IT) vendor, research shows, can help midsize businesses clear these hurdles to digital transformation and growth.
Relevant Insights
Data is key to your business edge—collecting it, analyzing it for the right insights, and then applying these insights to improve decision making and customer experience. For midsize businesses, applying the right insights can benefit from having a strong IT partnership.
One Japan-based specialist in industrial automation needed to help customers conduct predictive maintenance, detect leaks, and monitor energy use. The corporation met this need by adopting its IT partner’s software platform, improving its capabilities for connecting and visualizing industrial assets, performing analytics, and integrating data sets among its IT systems.
The pandemic tested the capabilities of one high-performance data-storage user, Italy’s Università Degli Studi Di Pisa, which faced extreme demands in assisting a nearby hospital with pertinent Covid-19 research while supporting an AI-based chemistry research project and a multicloud shared service for administrative agencies, hospitals, and cities. The university introduced its IT partner’s software platforms to tap the power it needed to run these intensive operations simultaneously and get the insights it needed.
Data Security
The advantages of our increasingly connected, increasingly digital world come with a catch: the imperative to stay prepared for the unknown. Your midsize business likely had to face the pandemic by making abrupt and significant operational changes, moving hardware, software, data—and people—off-premises.
One midsize medical researcher provides risk-assessment modeling for prescription drugs to hospitals and clinics through predictive analytics. To protect this sensitive data on its private cloud while shifting its property off-prem, the company enlisted its IT provider to help ensure the security of its private cloud with its developers and researchers.
Of course, not all emergencies happen in the natural world. When one commercial and residential window manufacturer recently found itself under a ransomware attack, its IT partner helped keep the business running on specialized storage solutions—and offered unique financing options.
Limited Resources
The optimal IT partner accommodates its partners’ resources, helping meet budget challenges for midsize businesses allocating their spending with extra precision in an adverse business climate.
A health and wellness company reacted to the pandemic by immediately shifting 15% of its workforce off-site for the first time. The company faced an emergency need to rush-order devices so medical researchers could work from home—in some cases, small apartments. And in an evolving situation, it needed temporary leases far shorter than most commitments with 36-month minimums.
An IT partner quickly alleviated the company’s concerns over order lag times and staff disruption, leasing and distributing desktops, monitors, and all-in-one (AIO) central processing unit (CPU) coolers to homebound employees, fitting even limited spaces. With no predictable end to the temporary working conditions, this partner modified its contracts to include shorter leasing interval options.
In Louisiana’s St. Helena Parish School District, when the stay-at-home orders went into effect, many students struggled to keep up with live online classes and homework assignments.
Because the district wanted to offer educational equity for remote learning, it turned to its IT provider initially for student devices but ended up with a complete solution to prepare them for future challenges. Significantly, the provider designed this solution to scale up for a longer-term quarantine, which has proved necessary.
Facing the Future
Although midsize businesses vary widely in circumstances, most are focused on accelerating digital transformation. Fortunately, they don’t need to do so alone. An IT partner that can support its initiatives on capturing and using data insights, keeping its data securely stored, and accommodating limited resources might be the partner that puts your business at the head of your industry.
Source: https://hbr.org/sponsored/2021/02/clearing-three-hurdles-to-digital-transformation
