Digital Transformation in Numbers: Key Trends to Learn from

Published 23/04/24 under:

Digital transformation has shifted over the years from a way to gain competitive advantage to a day-to-day reality for the vast majority of businesses.

At Kerv Consult, we partner with businesses to help them deliver the digital transformation they need to achieve their goals, so we’ve seen how projects play out across a wide range of different organisations.

Our digital transformation survey interviewed 100 IT leaders with decision making responsibility for digital transformation within their organisations. The survey data is a window into how businesses are managing digital transformation, and the challenges they face when doing so.

Here are some of the key trends the data highlighted:

94% of businesses have a formal digital transformation strategy

The vast majority of IT leaders are juggling multiple digital transformation projects, and organisations take the process seriously, with formalised strategies, defined success measurement approaches and up to 20% (or more) of IT budgets devoted to digital transformation efforts.

87% of the businesses surveyed had current digital transformation projects underway, while just 13% currently weren’t undertaking any digital transformation activity.

Companies are focusing on easy wins for digital transformation.

Their main objectives of digital transformation are an IT refresh and IT infrastructure updates, this is likely linked to the current situation with a huge increase in employees remote working.

While many organisations are looking to digital transformation to help them innovate and improve their customer experience, the bulk of digital transformation projects continue to be reactive, designed to refresh aging infrastructure and IT systems.

With a huge increase in remote and hybrid working in recent years it’s not surprising that many have had to overhaul their infrastructure, although others did state that they were doing so to react to competitive threats.

There’s room to improve the success of digital transformation projects.

While the majority of digital transformation projects were considered somewhat successful, 1 in 5 entirely fail, leaving teams frustrated and budgets wasted.

Only 38% of respondents rated their projects as having been “very successful”, with 19% stating that they were “neutral”, “somewhat unsuccessful” or “very unsuccessful”.

With the criticality of digital transformation to organisation’s long term success, it’s surprising that so many are still unsuccessful.

Lack of leadership is a key cause of project failure

The main pain points experienced with digital transformation projects were lack of a clear vision, and lack of ownership within projects.  Senior leadership and strategy was the biggest pain point area for businesses.

Businesses were less sure on the potential solutions. While better defined project ownership was the most popular choice, there was a broad spread of answers ranging from increased budget through to better senior management support or even internal change management to promote the benefits of projects across the organisation.

Businesses lack confidence running projects internally

While 39% of businesses stated that all their digital transformation projects were managed fully internally, less than a quarter of organisations are “extremely confident” in running future digital transformation projects using only their internal team.

Project complexity was the most common reason for choosing to work with a third party, although time constraints, budgets and a lack of the right internal skills all also scored highly.

A hybrid approach to delivery is most successful

Almost three quarters of organisations would be “very likely” to use an external supplier in the future to implement their digital transformation initiatives.

Those who have used an external supplier in the past found they either always met or exceeded their expectations. In fact, 90% of digital transformation projects were considered successful when delivered using a mixture of internal and external teams, considerably more than when projects were delivered either fully internally or fully externally.

Organisations leverage consultants to access specialist skills and strategic guidance

There are a huge variety of attributes that businesses look for when selecting a supplier to work with on their digital transformation initiatives. The most highly ranked factor was the ability to embed staff within the business, suggesting that organisations are aware of the importance of a hybrid approach.

Other factors businesses looked for in third party digital transformation consultants were specialist sector knowledge, the ability to identify problems in advance, and providing ongoing support after implementation,

To find out more about how Kerv Consult can help you make your next digital transformation project a success, contact us today!