Micro Focus is a company that uses the phrase ‘Powering Digital Transformation’ to describe what it does. [1] It has a range of some 300 software products and solutions that enable customers to modernise or automate some part of their business: from Visual COBOL running on AWS to lifecycle management in the form of ALM Octane to secure endpoint management with the ZENworks Suite or clever secure file sharing with Filr. [2] It labels the exhibition area at the Micro Focus Universe event as the “Digital Transformation Zone”.
Most, if not all, organisations have been embracing new IT based methods of working for many years, much of it kicked off with the personal computing revolution of the 1980’s. So is it possible to provide a succinct definition of digital transformation? One attempt is “Digital transformation (DX) is the reworking of the products, processes and strategies within an organisation by leveraging current technologies“. Mary Rouse in her TechTarget article on digital transformation [3] discusses this further writing that “digital transformation requires an examination and reinvention of most, if not all, areas within an organisation”. Current technology can have a terminal affect on a business, just compare Blockbuster and Netflix. Both started out renting dvds.
“Mobile technologies, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, social media platforms and other digital innovations have drastically changed how quickly customers can get information, thus changing the kind and quality of products and services they expect from the businesses and other agencies with whom they interact”.
Digital Transformation does create it’s own problems: it has been found by McKinsey and Co. that 70% of complex large scale change programs don’t meet their stated goals. Research from Dell cites security concerns, budget constraints, lack of skills and a huge inertia against replacing long established systems and services that cannot be easily replaced.
It’s important to have the support of an experienced company that has a wide spread of skills to enable digital transformation. Micro Focus is in fact such a company.