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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

You’ve heard it ad nauseam: Digital transformation is pivotal to the future success of your business. Your company has been throwing resources at that goal, but every effort has resulted in a piecemeal approach with underwhelming results. What you need is a road map that aligns business and tech. This report from the Boston Consulting Group provides tips for creating that road map. Spoiler alert: You’re not going to get there without C-suite buy-in, and you’re not going to get there with your current vendor ecosystem. You’ll need a tech-savvy workforce at a time when talent is scarce and in demand. But the rewards? Worth it.

Summary

IT spending continues to climb, but companies are still struggling to reach digital maturity due to cybersecurity issues, difficulty scaling and a shortage of tech talent.

Many companies still see IT as a support function built piecemeal as needs arise. This mind-set leads to a lack of alignment between the tech part of the company and the business itself, as well as “accumulating technical debt” and lagging digital maturity. These same companies often also praise agile ways of working but fail to implement agility across the board. Meanwhile, technology architecture is unnecessarily complicated, and varies across different regions and divisions, such that progress becomes expensive and slow, and siloed data capabilities make scaling a struggle. 

Innovative tech vendors and internal talent could address these issues, but many companies have failed to create reliable relationships with the right specialized tech vendors, and qualified hires...

About the Authors

Ashwin Bhave, Michael Grebe, Claus Helbing, Heiner Himmelreich, Rohit Nalgirkar, Juuso Soininen, Johan Stockmann and Amarendran Subramanian are professionals with the Boston Consulting Group.