Successful digital transformation isn’t just about technology but having the right principles and culture in place.

For many enterprises, digital transformation (DX) is fast becoming a reality. IDC predicts that at least 50 percent of global GDP will be digitized by 2021, with growth driven by digitally-enhanced offerings, operations and relationships. IDC expects that, by 2020, 60 percent of all enterprises will have articulated an organization-wide strategy for DX and be in the process of implementing it.

Gartner’s 2018 CIO Agenda report corroborates this thinking, placing digital business and digital transformation as the second biggest priority for CIOs after growth and market share. 78% of all CIOs Gartner surveyed report that digital business is making their IT organizations better equipped for change – a figure that rises to 93% at top-performing companies.

These CIOs understand that tomorrow’s business must be service led; that AI and analytics, new cloud-native services, data and hyper-agile architectures can help them focus in on the needs of their customers, respond to feedback and move away from unpredictable product cycles to more sustainable service-led income.

Yet the more strategic thinkers also understand that technology alone is not the answer. Too many initiatives come with an excess of hype and a scarcity of Return on Investment (ROI). All too often they fail through a lack of consensus, focus or board-level support, not to mention entrenched departmental silos. What’s more, there’s a danger that, in pushing to embrace the shiny and new, companies struggle to maintain the ‘business as usual’.

‘For most organizations, when they think about digital transformation they immediately think about the technology’ says Claire Agutter, chief architect at VeriSM, a service management approach created specifically to address the challenges of the digital age.

‘The challenges that organizations see are more about their readiness to change and take advantage of the technology. It’s about structural challenges, it’s about how the organizations collaborate internally, it’s about their business processes.’

For Agutter, the secret is to have good governance and good principles to guide their products and their service teams.

‘What we’ve seen with the organizations we’ve worked with, is that where digital transformation is taken seriously at the strategic level, that governance, that compliance is built in from the beginning.’

This is where VeriSM can help, acting as a set of ‘guardrails’ for the enterprise as it goes through its digital transformation journey.

Organizations can define their service management principles and how they prioritize areas like security, quality or speed to market. They can focus on their objectives, not the technology. This helps them avoid one common pitfall – being too focused on a specific way of working – and look more at what they want to achieve and on how best to achieve it.

A big part of this is the concept of the Management Mesh – a structure unique to each company that considers their environment and their resources, then allows them to draw on the different management practices and emerging technologies that best serve business aims. The mesh evolves as new practices and technology emerges, giving the organization flexibility to grow. As Agutter explains, ‘they can look at the different management practices – DevOps, Agile, Lean – and think ‘which of these are appropriate for us, but they also have these guardrails that they need to stay within. It gives them clarity.’

By providing both flexibility and a clear approach, VeriSM acts as the glue for digital service management, enabling organizations to combine a wider range of management practices and working methods to deliver the right service at the right time to the right consumer. In doing so they can break down silos and move away from rigid, ineffective ways of working, putting companies on the right path.

For more information about VeriSM, visit verism.exin.com

View the recent Exin Webcast The steps to building a digital, services-led organization to hear views from Claire Agutter, Chief Architect at Verism , on how businesses put the processes in place for successful digital transformation, setting themselves up to become a services-orientated business.