How Today’s CIO Can Blaze a Trail to Digital Transformation

In an era of digital innovation, companies are looking for ways to leverage digital technology to attract more customers, generate new revenue streams and provide enhanced services – faster than the competition. Increasingly, a seamless digital experience is at the heart of successful digital transformation, both inside and outside the organization. Presidio has defined the four pillars of digital transformation as:

1. Digital experience: How can digital technologies power new ways of engaging customers and new revenue streams?
2. The Internet of Things (IoT): How can connected things combined with data analytics create smarter, more efficient businesses, transportation, buildings, and communities?
3. Hybrid or multi-cloud: How can cloud (both public and private) be part of the digital transformation journey?
4. Cybersecurity: With more devices and end points communicating more data, what security is needed across architecture, platform, and analytics?

A New Customer Demands a New CIO
Consider call centers, for example. In response to the needs of a new generation, legacy voice solutions are giving way to an omni-channel customer experience that offers multiple touch points encompassing social media and digital technology while using artificial intelligence to augment live agents.

In fact, CIOs and CEOs who are not working on digitally transforming their business are already losing ground to the competition. That’s why the role of the enterprise CIO is changing. More than an IT professional, today’s CIO knows how to use technology to advance business strategy and solve specific business problems cost-effectively. As part of the executive team, the digitally-focused CIO leverages technology to boost revenue streams and improve processes, underpinned by a connected, secure, cloud-enabled infrastructure.

Digital Transformation: Where to Start?
Of course, it’s not always easy to move from legacy applications to next-generation digital capabilities. Many companies start with a digital readiness assessment, which helps you evaluate your current business models and determine how digital technology can be integrated to create improvements.

Companies are assessing:

• How do we deliver a digital experience? Is there a new app or social media tool that will attract them? What about creating an omni-channel experience to improve their ability to communicate with you? Does your marketing strategy appeal to this customer segment?
• How can we use data analytics to generate new revenue streams, change business outcomes, be more competitive, and attract new clients?
• What is our cloud strategy for using multi-cloud or hybrid cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) to be more agile?

Where the Digital Trail Is Headed

Companies are now asking the following questions:

1. How can we generate revenue from IoT? Vast amounts of data are being generated by sensor-enabled devices. How can data analytics from IoT generate revenue from this data? And what is the right next-generation infrastructure?
2. What is our multi-cloud strategy? Industry focus is moving from simply adopting cloud (now reaching its maturity stage) towards a better understanding of where to best leverage cloud, both public and private, to deliver flexible, agile business outcomes at speed and
3. What about cybersecurity? No company wants to be tomorrow’s headline. Cybersecurity is not just about infrastructure or endpoint security, it is a holistic architecture framework discussion. How can you detect, prevent and respond to threats? How do you apply analytics to respond faster to these threats?

Presidio helps clients digitally transform their businesses and operations. Engaging your customers and constituents across generations, platforms and channels is at the heart of everything we do.