Are you thinking about digital transformation? Well, according to the world, if you aren’t you should be. Digital innovation is the theme from annual reports to company websites. While digital transformation may be a buzz phrase, every industry is going through it even if they don’t appear so on the surface. Executives want to assure shareholders they have invested in a company that is at the forefront of the digital age and will not lose customers to competitors because they didn’t stay connected.
The Challenges of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is an extremely complex endeavor, requiring IT to integrate with every part of the business. The larger and older your industry, the more complex it is to execute this strategy. Not only must you contend with the amount of legacy technology in today’s IT foundations, but also the movement of business to go out and look for fast solutions that leverage current technologies.
Banking and financial services industries are the most obvious and prime examples of having to confront the challenges of today’s changing digital technology. Staying competitive requires increasing transactions, which necessitates a constant focus on the customer experience to ensure those continued interactions. However, what happens when you put modern technology in your customers’ hands, but it can’t connect with your back office?
Or, what happens if you are the first in your industry to deliver digital innovations, but they don’t work? Hotels are spending a massive amount of money to move from traditional check-in processes to digital ones, where guests can use their mobile phone to check in, access their room, check out and pay. Imagine the day when you walk into a hotel and your phone vibrates with a room number and you head straight there? It’s not that far off, but it will take longer if hotels don’t get the early rollout of such innovation right. A great experience can turn bad, fast, when technology fails.
Digital transformation initiatives don’t just impact the technology and the integrations but also the people and processes across the organization who handle the company’s day-to-day operations. The change management for such an initiative is huge and can’t be taken for granted.
Reinventing Portfolio Management to Facilitate Digital Transformation
So, what does this mean for portfolio management? It’s time to reinvent portfolio management to ensure your organization can successfully deliver such initiatives. By leveraging portfolio management, IT and the business can come together to create and execute a digital strategy.
However, I’m not just talking project and portfolio management; I’m talking about portfolios: Portfolios that represent a strategic objective and the roadmap of where the organization wants to go, how they will get there, and what they will have once they are there. This is unlike traditional portfolio management, which often includes just a group of projects and their alignment to a strategy. A strategic roadmap should be comprised of all the outcomes that need to be created, enhanced and connected across the organization, including the applications, technologies, services, solutions, products and other outcomes needed to achieve your strategic deliverable.
This roadmap would then incorporate all the twists and turns of execution including milestones, releases, schedules, roadmaps and the most current data to drive decisions that impact the portfolio. You can manage and adapt the portfolio and its roadmaps based upon new information that is looped back in from execution, not just from projects but also the applications, technologies and services being created or impacted by such an initiative. This is especially helpful when you have strategic initiatives that are new or so large that there is a lot of uncertainly about how you are going to execute them. It’s even more powerful when you consider the amount of integrations and connectivity within digital transformation.
You don’t transform your business and effectively change processes, implement new technologies or integrate systems in a silo. It takes strategic coordination, which you can now do with portfolio management. With Planview Enterprise 12, strategic roadmaps come alive with not just the programs and project schedules but also the applications, technologies and services that digital transformation initiatives impact. You can coordinate across portfolios to drive strategic execution based upon updated information from key milestones, releases and real-time data.
What guides your path to help drive digital transformation in portfolio management? The answer is 12 – Planview Enterprise 12.
Check back to learn more about Planview Enterprise’s customer-driven enhancements, such as new timesheets and embedded Microsoft® Power BI® analytics.
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