Forrester's 2013 report, The Chief Digital Officer: Fad or Future?, already stated that digital leaders do not necessarily need to bear the title of CDO. CIOs who follow the trends closely can also evolve towards strong digital leadership. However, research company IDC's Worldwide CIO Agenda 2015 predicted that 60% of CIOs would be replaced by CDOs worldwide by 2020. Gartner's most recent CIO survey of 2016 says that the majority of CEOs are very confident that the CIO will take the digital transformation in the right direction.
If you want to enable your company to deal with disruptive, flexible competitors, you need to go through a digital transformation, a process that is best managed by an expert. It would be a fatal error to think that digitization is not all that urgent. The customers of tomorrow are not just "digital immigrants" in their forties who can remember how to send a fax. They also include the digital natives, generation Z, young people who were born with a smartphone in their hand and who prefer to use digital portals to do their administration. Some examples of this type of administration are declarations and requests submitted to the government, digital construction files for people building a house and digital insurance files. The next generation of customers will always want digital portals in all areas of business.
Who will lead the digital transformation?
Does this mean that your company needs a CDO to enter the digital era?
CIOs who want to achieve a digital transformation for their business are facing big challenges. In recent years, they have been constructing a wide range of applications. Many CIOs are currently focusing on how all applications interact with each other, but the next challenge has already cropped up: "digital". This digitization also means that some applications may have already become obsolete now.
CIOs therefore need to move very quickly to keep up with the trends and to ensure IT plays that much-coveted role of "business driver". This explains the rise of Chief Digital Officers who are given the opportunity to have the digital revolution as their sole focus.
To get there, together
Job titles are not really important, but digital leadership is. If a CIO currently does not have or get sufficient opportunities to provide digital leadership, cooperation is the solution.
A collaboration model such as the Realdolmen DevOps Factory allows you and our experts to discover the possibilities of digital platforms together. The short iterations inherent to the agile methodology of the DevOps Factory enable you to examine the requirements of your future customers in a quick and budget-friendly way. Prototypes and incremental deliveries make it possible to adjust ideas in the course of the project in order to align them with rapid changes in the market. In that sense, the DevOps Factory is a learning process for you as a CIO in order to refine your digital knowledge. As a customer, you are a full member of the project team in the Realdolmen DevOps Factory and you are closely involved from the ideas phase to the test phase, so all experts follow the same learning curve together.
Digital maturity thanks to the Realdolmen DevOps Factory
We conclude by sharing some astonishing figures. In 2015, the Digital Maturity Survey by consultancy firm Delaware showed that many Belgian companies are afraid of the digital evolution. 23% of the companies surveyed feel that digitization is too complex for them and that if they were to get started, they would have to go 100% digital from one moment to the next. 17% believe they are facing technological challenges and are intimidated by new, unknown technologies. And yet 89% of companies think that their digital activities will increase considerably in the coming years. Only 8% have a digital department.
All the more reason to focus fully on collaboration models and to use the experience that is available on the market.
If you want to realize a certain idea, or if you would like more information on the Realdolmen DevOps Factory, do not hesitate to contact Roel De Cuyper, Realdolmen DevOps Factory Manager, at roel.decuyper@realdolmen.com.
To find out more about Realdolmen DevOps Factory, read the blogposts published previously:
Reducing your time-to-market: R Project (DevOps)Factory, your ideas incubator