Beyond survival: Is your digital transformation strategy geared for growth?

Guest post by Mark Cockerill a vice-president at ServiceNow based in Dublin.

I was thinking about some of the customer roundtables we hosted at the beginning of last year. The topic of these discussions was the digital transformation agenda in Europe – but looking back, knowing what we know now, it is interesting to see what has changed and what hasn’t since we were having those meetings.

Obviously, there has been one rather big change for all of us. There is just no ignoring the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on every business in the last nine months. But despite, or maybe because of, that one big event that has influenced so much, it’s more interesting to look at what hasn’t changed since the start of this year.

Perhaps the main thing that hasn’t changed is the fundamental realisation that digital transformation is simply not an option anymore. We knew it before the COVID-19 crisis and it’s even clearer now.

In the last few months, it is fair to say that the CIO has become a bit of a hero again. The rapid response to the crisis — to keep people working safely from home and to keep the lights on — has been incredibly valuable.

The economic impacts of the pandemic have been unprecedented. Countries across Europe have not just dipped into recession, but in many cases plunged. Here in Ireland, GNI is expected to rise from 95.6% to just under 115% in 2021. But as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic and lockdown period, it’s clear there is a determination amongst customers to not go backwards, that transformation needs to accelerate.

Keeping the lights on is not enough. Organisations want to do more than just survive and embracing digitisation looks to be the near-universal strategy for thriving in these circumstances.

Indeed, while 81% of organisations in Europe expect a decrease in 2020 revenue as a result of Covid-19, only 30% expect IT spending to be lower than originally planned in 2020 (source: IDC European IT Buyer Sentiment Survey)

Bringing clarity to increased complexity

There is a disconnect in how businesses have approached digital transformation. In the last two years, EMEA organisations have invested $543 billion in digital transformation – and yet only 26% have delivered an ROI (source: IDC).

But speaking to CIOs recently, we’re seeing that digital transformation strategies are rapidly evolving and crystallising. There are a number of drivers behind this.

Firstly, CIOs are finding that they are talking to more departments within the organisation than ever before. They are also more closely involved in crisis management and planning as a result of the outsized role that technology is playing in keeping the show on the road.

At the same time, perceptions of the CIO have changed. Through digital technologies, the CIO is actually now the one responsible for really connecting people. Zoom isn’t just the video conferencing software you use, it is a vital connection for people suddenly spread far and wide.

And finally, by the same token, employees are more conscious than ever before of inefficiencies in workflows. The end result of this is that the CIO role is becoming more complex; there are more ‘stakeholders’ to satisfy.

So perhaps it is no surprise that – at the top level at least – CIOs are responding with straightforward strategies that cut through complexity into the heart of what will benefit the business most.

One strategic path focuses on the employee experience. Working with the HR department or the talent organisation, we are seeing a big uptick in demand for solutions that offer staff more support – wherever they are working – or that smooth those rough edges off internal processes to boost productivity.

The other path focuses on the customer experience. The demand for customer service management (CSM) solutions is exploding and we see that it is genuinely cutting across every sector, including government organisations.

A laser focus on value

While the technology focus is clear, there is one other element that has come to the fore since the start of this year.

Back in February last year, one of the big topics of debate at our customer roundtables was the need to create business cases for specific solutions, and roadmaps for how to maximise the value of tech investments for the long term.

ServiceNow was slightly ahead of many customers on this point, with a Now Value programme in place that’s specifically built to deliver exactly this sort of support to CIOs. Together, we help them to make the case for digitisation in their organisation — and that means a business case for investment.

COVID-19 has only intensified this demand. As much as future growth will be guided by technology and the digital capabilities an organisation has, there is also now a laser focus on the value digital tech can deliver. Investments cannot be made in the hope that they will pay off. Indeed, data from IDC EMEA’s COVID-19 Impact Survey commissioned by ServiceNow shows that fully 80% of EMEA organisations will re-evaluate their technology investments with a focus on ROI.

At ServiceNow, we are uniquely placed to enable CIOs to benchmark themselves against all of our other customers. We can help them see how digitised they really are and where they sit on the transformation maturity curve and enable them to be confident in exactly what value and returns they can expect on any given investment.

The disruption we have seen in the last nine months isn’t going to disappear in the post-COVID world. If anything, it will continue to ramp up in 2021.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles.

If you would like to be featured in our podcast series drop us a line & don’t forget to sign up for notifications for our latest episodes and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, SoundCloud, iTunes or your own favourite podcast platform.

Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking