Research shows IT overhaul key to beating out competition

According to the results of new research commissioned by Dell EMC and Intel, and conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) IT transformation can result in bottom-line benefits that drive business differentiation, innovation and growth.

In order to survive and thrive in today's digital world, businesses are implementing new technologies, processes and skill sets to best address changing customer needs.

A fundamental first step to this change is transforming IT to help organisations bring products to market faster, remain competitive and drive innovation.

According to ESG's '2018 IT Transformation Maturity Study', 81% of survey respondents agree if they do not embrace IT transformation, their organisation will no longer be competitive in their markets, up from 71% in 2017.

Other findings include 88% of respondents saying that their organisation is under pressure to deliver new products and services at an increasing rate and that organisations who have undergone a digital transformation are 22x more likely to be ahead of the competition when bringing new products and services to market.

These 'transformed' companies are also 18x more likely to make better and faster data-driven decisions than their competition and are 2x as likely to exceed their revenue goals

"Data is the new competitive edge - yet it's become highly distributed across the edge, the core data center and cloud," says Dell Technologies products and operations vice chairman Jeff Clarke.

"Organisations realise they have to move quickly to turn that data into business intelligence – requiring an end-to-end IT infrastructure that can manage, analyse, store and protect data everywhere it lives.

ESG employed a research-based, data-driven maturity model to identify different stages of IT transformation progress and determine the degree to which global organisations have achieved those different stages, based on their responses to questions about their organisations' adoption of modernised data center technologies, automated IT processes and transformed organisational dynamics.

"Companies today need to be agile to stay competitive and drive growth, and IT transformation can be a major enabler of that," says ESG vice president of research John McKnight.

"It's clear that IT transformation is increasingly resonating with companies and that senior executives recognise how IT Transformation is pivotal to overall business strategy and competitiveness. While achieving transformation can be a major endeavour, our research shows 'Transformed' companies experience real business results, including being more likely to be ahead of the competition in bringing new products and services to market, making better, faster data-driven decisions than their competition, and exceeding their revenue goals.