In 2020, organizations had to give their digital transformation a boost to meet the demand for digital services and ensure the productivity of their telecommuting employees. To finish accomplishing their transformation projects in 2021, CIOs must now overcome a major obstacle: organizational silos, which impedes team collaboration.
This is the conclusion of the Global CIO Report 2021 of the software publisher Dynatrace.
This report is based on an international survey of 700 CIOs from large companies in eight countries, including France.
Here’s a summary of the study. It highlights:
- the main challenges for CIOs in 2021
- impacts the silo effect has on businesses
- ways to improve collaboration between IT and the business
CIOs under pressure
In 2020, 89% of CIOs surveyed saw an acceleration in the digital transformation of businesses, and 58% believe they should continue this momentum in 2021.
Also read: COVID’s Impact on the Digitalization of Companies: A Summary of the McKinsey Study (2020)
Pressure on CIOs has been mounting along with the increasing demand for digital services. However, 93% of them believe their ability to create value is hampered by three major obstacles:
- “siloed” IT teams on one side and business teams on the other
- limited visibility and data on user perception of digital service performance
- limited visibility into the business value of changes to digital services (e.g., software upgrades)
Other challenges are also more present this year, including:
- a rise in problems related to computer performance
- the transition to remote work
- increased demand for cloud services
Also read: Deloitte: The 9 Technology Trends for 2021
Thus, 46% of CIOs believe their teams have never been so much in demand.
Siloed operations hinder collaboration
Half of the CIOs surveyed say that their company’s IT and business teams currently operate in silos.
This lack of collaboration has led to several negative effects, including:
- a decrease in teams’ ability to respond quickly to changing business needs
- loss of IT efficiency due to time wasted discussing and blaming others
- greater difficulty in identifying the seriousness of a problem and reducing its impact
- greater difficulty in evaluating the effectiveness of IT tools
- difficulty in fully understanding business and customer needs, and thus maximizing the business value of IT
- a net loss of income
Teams that work in silos often use a multitude of different tools to accomplish their tasks. As a result, they find it difficult to compare data and assess the impact of IT investments on the business—a problem that 74% of CIOs surveyed complain about.
As a result, organizational silos also have a heavy impact on productivity. On average, IT and business teams waste about 12.5 hours per week (or 654 hours per year) trying to combine disparate data to identify solutions to their problems. This lost productivity is estimated to cost each company an average of $1.7 million per year.
The need to transform the way we work
To maintain productivity, meet consumer demand, and keep up with the competition, companies must break down silos between IT, developers, and business teams to encourage cross-team collaboration.
In all, 95 percent of CIOs believe that IT investment decisions need to be more data-driven to limit lost time and revenue.
They also recommend implementing a unified platform to facilitate collaboration between teams, allowing them to establish a single source of truth. However, only 14% of companies surveyed have this type of platform in place.
To ease the workload of the IT department and avoid overuse of resources, companies are also beginning to adopt new approaches:
- BizDevOps, which encourages developers, business, and IT teams to work together to respond more quickly to business needs
- autonomous cloud operations
- NoOps, which consists of automating the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of applications
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The conclusion is clear: the siloed nature of IT, developers, and business teams hinders collaboration and prevents companies from innovating quickly.
To accelerate their digital transformation, organizations need to rethink their way of working. For example, to implement a BizDevOps approach, they can rely on a collaborative platform to centralize data in one place and develop cross-team collaboration.
Also read: 8 Essential Steps for Choosing Your Collaborative Platform
Interested in learning more about Covid’s impact on digital transformation? Check out our summary of Stormshield’s latest study, “Corporate digital transformation: putting maturity to the test?”
Author: Emmanuelle Abensur
