The Key to Success in Digital Transformation - A Trusted Technology Partner
The undertaking of digital transformation must be considered from all angles. It requires a strategic approach, a candid evaluation of the role it will play in your company, and onboarding of this process. The extent of external support you utilize will also affect the success of your digital transformation initiatives. Some companies leverage an implementation or technology partner to help them with this process. The benefit of a technology partner is that they offer an all-in approach that unlocks the full potential of a successful digital transformation process.
There is a fundamental difference between implementation providers and technology partners. Companies use implementation providers to help build applications and systems that are already planned, and in most cases, already designed. The implementation provider is simply the addition of skilled resources that have experience in using the desired technologies specified by the client. It’s about a delivery, and staffing projects with the right resources to get the work done within the parameters of a schedule and budget. There is certainly no shortage of implementation partners and it’s getting very difficult to distinguish the capabilities between them.
A digital transformation technology partner, on the other hand, is engaged from beginning to end. While delivery is certainly a key aspect of a technology partner's offering, it’s only one of several. Technology partners begin with determining the best digital strategy with the client’s C-suite, creating a transformation plan where business goals serve as the centerpiece. How will this drive the business forward? How will this distance us from the competition? What is the ROI and time to value (TTV)? How will we design, build and manage this technology change for the next 10 years? What cloud provider would be the best fit for this change? Should we use open source technologies or be locked in to a cloud provider's solution? What skills does my current team need to acquire to make this successful? What culture is in conflict with this new direction and what needs to change organizationally to make this work? These are some of the critical issues that a digital transformation technology partner can help you work through and resolve.
As you can see, a technology partner takes a holistic view and focuses first on creating a strategy with a solid foundation, and then follows that strategy with a very detailed execution plan. It could be taking a monolithic application from on prem to the cloud. Or, it could be transitioning to a cloud native development organization embracing full automation and DevSecOps. Regardless, these things are never easy to do. As leadership expert Robin Sharma likes to say: “Change is hard at first, messy in the middle and glorious in the end”.
In summary, before you bite off that next big technology move for your business, think hard about using a technology partner instead of just a staff augmentation agency to increase your odds of success. Partnering with someone that has “been there, done that” and will be joined with you at the hip from strategy to implementation and beyond, will give leaders like you the comfort of knowing that they are on the right track to a successful digital transformation.