Digital Transformation — an endless journey towards perfection

2018 was declared a year of enterprise DevOps by Forrester Research, as more than 50% of enterprises worldwide have completed the transition to DevOps. However, their digital journey just begins.

As the recently published SoftServe research on the state of digital transformation states, around 70% of the US an EU companies are currently going through their digital transformation. This includes the companies from multiple industries like finances, healthcare, insurance, travel, e-commerce, and telecom, who understand the impact of DevOps adoption for their business performance and want to leverage this competitive advantage.

However, there is a serious misunderstanding regarding the very essence of the process. First of all, people cannot formulate with certainty what digital transformation actually is. Secondly, most of the businesses tend to perceive it as a one-time effort of adopting new tools, processes and DevOps culture with certain KPIs and deadlines. Actually, digital transformation has no deadlines.

Digital transformation is the continuous process of improving business operations using the latest technology and following the best practices of DevOps culture.

This process can be divided into 4 major parts:

1. Auditing the existing workflows and infrastructure in place to understand the weaknesses and determine the areas for growth
2. Transforming the existing processes through cloud transition, adoption of DevOps culture, implementing the latest DevOps best practices and tools, etc.
3. Accelerating the completion of the business goals due to the improved tech and empowered team efficiency.
4. Optimizing the newly adopted tech to better align it with company vision and strategy.

Thus said, the 4th stage can have no deadlines and will continue onwards from the point of finishing the initial digital transformation. The new tech will appear from time to time, the DevOps tools you use will evolve, the cloud service providers will doubtlessly innovate further in this area — so there is not and can never be a full stop in your digital journey.

For example, DevOps adoption will allow accelerating the software development significantly, as well as improving the performance and reliability of customer-facing production systems. However, this will also require future-proofing your products and services. This means the following:

1. Reforming your approach to cybersecurity, shifting the security checks to the left along the software delivery pipeline and automating them to enable DevSecOps
2. Designing and implementing the Machine Learning support and Big Data analytics for your business-generated data. This will serve as the basis for continuous innovation and improving the value delivery to your customers.
3. Building multi-cloud production environments, able to adjust by adding or removing certain modules within minutes, so your product remains flexible and able to respond to ever-changing customer requirements at all times.

Final thoughts on the digital journey

As one can see, digital transformation is a complex endeavor, but it is extremely rewarding. When your company is revitalized through using the latest technology and best practices, dealing with any business challenges becomes much easier.

How to begin the digital transformation then? By employing the talents that know how it is done! You can either strive to build the expertise in-house or hire an external contractor to execute the task. Should you opt for the latter — IT Svit, one of the world-leading Managed Services Providers, is ready to help!