• Executive Summary

    To create the IT organization that will support a modern, digital business, CIOs are examining their infrastructure, applications, and operating models. Hundreds have asked Dell EMC and VMware to assist by evaluating their current state, assessing gaps, and prioritizing actions they can take to create that digital-ready IT organization that the business needs.

    The State of IT Transformation is an analysis of data provided by CIOs and their direct reports who participated in a transformation workshop led by Dell EMC or VMware. Over 660 organizations have participated. This is not a random sample of research subjects, but an analysis of organizations that are actually in the midst of an IT transformation.

    Read the full report and see how your organization compares to your industry peers.

    Where do CIOs want to improve the most?

    CIOs are looking to reduce IT costs and use those savings to make investments in digital transformation. Many see adopting cloud technologies as a way to save not only on infrastructure costs, but more importantly, as a way to save on operating costs. 

    Cloud Infrastructure

    CIOs view creating a hybrid cloud architecture as a key enabler for them to provide the automation and self-service that will reduce operating costs. 70% want to standardize on a hybrid cloud architecture across the organization in the 2016-2017 timeframe with 90% currently in the evaluation or proof of concept stage.

    While 91% of the organizations have no consistent means of evaluating workloads for hybrid cloud, 61% plan to have evaluated suitability of their application portfolio for hybrid cloud delivery, informed by business process needs and sensitivity of corresponding data within the next 18-24 months.

    Operating Model

    As part of the operating model, service strategy was identified by 80% of the organizations as the top area they want to improve in the 2016-2017 timeframe. They want to run IT like a customer-focused business. They place a premium on developing the processes, roles, and skills to successfully manage the supply and demand side of the IT portfolio.

    The best way to do this is through automation and by empowering users with self-service portals that enable them to make value-based consumption decisions. 80% want to standardize services in a business-focused catalog with a self-service portal and 77% want to provision infrastructure resources dynamically, or in less than a day.

    Applications

    A critical part of digital transformation is empowering and accelerating application development. CIOs want to create agile processes and automate platform delivery so that they can help their companies create a competitive advantage by developing software faster. Yet, progress here is slow. The top gaps CIOs and their teams identified in the State of IT Transformation, with respect to applications, are in software development times and cloud-native platforms. 82% do not have a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework on which to rapidly and consistently build mobile-friendly, cloud-native apps. Perhaps due to the lack of a modern development framework, 68% of participants take 6–12+ months to complete a new development lifecycle.

    Conclusion

    This analysis shows that CIOs are prioritizing the areas where they will get the greatest return in building a digital-ready IT organization that the business needs. Over the last few years, participants have made significant progress in their transformation initiatives. This is easily seen when comparing the percentage of areas that participants rated themselves as being at the lowest level. A little over 50% of participants in the last 18 months rated themselves as very low in overall maturity, compared with nearly 70% of the participants 5 years ago. This is true regardless of industry, geography, or area. The most pronounced area of improvement has been in service strategy.

  • See How Your Organization Compares

    The Dell EMC IT Transformation Workshop will bring together your executives and get consensus among your team:

    • We identify gaps and develop recommendations for closing them 
    • We benchmark your organization and compare it with peers in your industry on key transformation metrics 
    • We prioritize next steps and provide you with an ROI for executing them, based on your budget and timeframe