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Open Digital Transformation: Industry Expertise Matters

Digital Business Transformation is at the center of new commercial growth strategies. Advances in IT technologies and associated accelerators are transforming whole industries and represent the largest driver of technology investment for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, most C-level business leaders agree that industry expertise matters, when choosing a strategic vendor partner that's capable of offering meaningful and substantive insights or guidance that will stand the tests of time.

Introduction to the Digital Transformation Taxonomy

Assisting decision makers to reach their goals, International Data Corporation (IDC) announced their "Digital Transformation (DX) Taxonomy" across industry verticals -- represented by 14 Digital Missions, 60 Strategic Priorities, 160 Programs, and over 450 specific Use Cases.

IDC now estimates that the economic value of DX strategies to be $20 trillion -- or more than 20 percent of global GDP. IDC's DX maturity benchmark of over 1,600 companies indicates that 67 percent are in the early stages of their transformation as "digital explorers" or "digital players," meaning less than 5 percent of companies are fully transformed.

According to the IDC assessment, the full disruptive impact of DX has not yet been realized, but it's going to fundamentally change business markets and the way that organization pursue a Digital Growth agenda in the future.

IDC's DX Taxonomy provides structured guidance on how industry and government verticals are creating and enabling digital transformation success in the digital economy. While the taxonomy is an extensive representation, it is not exhaustive and will evolve over time as technology matures and opportunities present themselves.

The DX taxonomy is a four level model:

  1. Digital Mission (one per industry) - The digital mission is the business organization's overarching aspirational goals and objectives. Each industry has its own unique mission.
  2. Strategic Priorities (several per digital mission) - There are several strategic priorities that describe what organizations expect to accomplish over an extended time period in order to achieve their digital mission.
  3. Programs (several per strategic priority) - Supporting each strategic priority are several programs. Each represents a long-term plan of action to achieve the strategic priorities through a series of use cases.
  4. Use Cases (several per program) - Under each program are a set of use cases. These are discretely funded efforts supporting a program objective. Use cases can be thought of as specific projects employing line of business and IT resources including hardware, software, and IT services. Each use case is organized by the use case name, current situation, business goals and objectives, key technologies used to enable desired business outcomes, and a summary of the results.

IDC analysts believe that for technology buyers, this collective body of expert guidance identifies where and how to craft a winning DX business strategy and execution road map for the journey ahead.

In contrast, for savvy IT vendors, the taxonomies provide an understanding of how and where key software, hardware, and IT services enable superior DX business outcomes.

Moreover, a demonstrated knowledge of current workloads, industry context and the regulatory environment, all matter greatly in selecting a qualified strategic partner. Achieving an Open Digital Transformation is the key to DX success. Make sure your Cloud platform works for you, choose wisely.

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