The key to enabling digital transformations is implementing organizational agility to keep up with the increasing pace of business technologies, according to a recent report.
The report by MuleSoft suggests that while digital transformations can enable new revenue channels for businesses, as well as new experiences for customers, the whole transformation process puts an added strain on already stretched IT resources.
After conducting a survey, MuleSoft found that agility was the top quality that businesses were looking for when planning their IT projects. Of the respondents, 66% of the IT decision-makers (ITDMs) said that if their digital issues weren't solved within six months their businesses would be negatively affected.
"When we speak with CIOs, one of the goals they are often looking to accomplish is increased IT agility to keep up with the pace of business," the report said. One way IT could significantly improve agility is by enabling their entire organizations with reusable assets to accomplish project goals.
By implementing reusability and self-serve consumption, IT organizations would be able to extend capacity and capability. "With this approach, IT federates work to where expertise within the organization exists," the MuleSoft report stated.
One method for increasing agility is the creation of an application network, which allows people both inside and outside of an enterprise controlled access to business data, including reusable APIs. By including more people in the digital transformation processes, there's not as much pressure on IT departments to be the one-stop shop for delivering projects to the rest of their organizations.
Instead of creating an application from scratch each time, an application network makes it easier for someone within the organization to build an application or API and then share it across the network. According to the MuleSoft report, the application network creates a new model that's "equal parts the production of assets and their consumption."
In a previous survey by MuleSoft, more than two-thirds of the ITDMs said they were undertaking digital transformation projects. In some industries, such as retail and financial services, close to 100% of the survey respondents were engaged in the digital transformation process.
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— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation