CIO Dinner Party, Part 3 - The IT Director Archives, Digital Transformation is the Theme of the Main Course

The IT Director has arrived, and top of mind is digital transformation. The CIO is anxiously waiting for the IT Director, to see what is in the main course of the dinner party. After spending a good amount of time with the Chief Procurement Officer (CPO), the CIO is confident that the savings realized with proactive software portfolio management can be used to drive digital transformation.

The concept of Digital Transformation is not new, but what is new is how organizations are framing the concept of digital transformation – particularly the IT Director. Although the IT Director does need to have a tactical approach when it comes to his day to day responsibilities – he also needs to maintain a direct line to all of the business units to better understand the longer term technology strategy needed. Each business unit has its own technology needs and the all up business needs to maintain vigilance in regards to optimizing their existing technology use, as well as what steps to take for future technology investments. Today, that starts with the cloud.

Many organizations today have a myriad tools still on-premises, but are looking to move some portion of their applications to the cloud (or a hybrid between the two) in order to more effectively serve the company, its customers, as well as potentially cut costs out of the existing IT infrastructure, while adding agility. Digital transformation gives you that extra flexibility and allows you to respond to client demands (both internally and externally) more quickly.

According to the recent Deloitte Global CPO Survey (2017), Deloitte (in conjunction with MIT Sloan Management Review) found that 90% of executives feel their industries will be disrupted by digital transformation, but only 44% are ready for such a disruption. Further, 71% of CPOs in the survey felt that their current teams did not have the skills to deliver on their proposed procurement strategy in order to successfully navigate such a disruption. This is a huge increase from last year where 45% of CPOs felt their team lacked the necessary skills. Many of the skills that were lacking include analytics, negotiation and presentation. This is an indicator that the relationship between the CPO and the IT Director needs to grow even closer in order to have more ears and eyes on the ground. This will ensure that the skills needed to meet the digital transformation challenges are being met.

As the IT director looks to understand what applications to move to the cloud, and the CPO has a broader view of all of the software and services used throughout the organization, the two complement each other in their roles. Consolidation, license mobility, and cost savings are areas where the CPO and IT Director need to collaborate as workloads shift from on-premises to the cloud. Additionally, the CPO traditionally has a methodology to maximize the value of the software portfolio and this methodology can be carried over.

With SoftwareONE’s PyraCloud Platform, the IT Director can leverage this methodology as follows:

• Plan – The IT director can evaluate cloud resource options based on requirements and budget accordingly. Subsequently, the IT director can forecast and acquire the cloud resources that satisfies the requirements of various Lines of Business (LoB).
• Track – PyraCloud provides a view of all the cloud resources being consumed at an organizational level. The IT director will have a consolidated view and is able to track consumption, track business unit spend, do charge-backs and predict future usage based on historical trends.
• Reduce and Optimize – Through having complete visibility into the cloud resources, the IT director can consolidate resources as needed to reduce and optimize spend.

In conclusion, PyraCloud gives the IT director the ability to put in place controls to effectively budget and manage spend of the digital transformation. Not only that, but we live in a hybrid world, and how appropriate that the IT director bring to the table a platform to help us proactively manage in a hybrid world. It is the ability of the CPO and IT Director to work seamlessly together to reduce the friction of transforming the organization and effectively manage the budget and spend once transformed.

Join us in the next chapter as we start enjoying the much anticipated and well deserved cheese course, and hear how the Compliance Officer is able to better manage the risk associated with the overall software portfolio.