Mike Larson, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Agiliti Health, Inc.
Mike Larson, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Agiliti Health, Inc.
Ask any CIO about their thoughts on digital transformation, and you’re likely going to get a similar response—it’s a fatigued term with a meaning rendered ambiguous from overuse. While the term itself might cause a few eye-rolls across the industry—having a strategy for digital transformation is unavoidable. More than ever, businesses must double-down on the transformation of technology to keep pace with the market and deliver unique and increasing value to customers and clients – and be prepared for what’s coming next.
That challenge is determining what that transformation looks like and how to make it a reality without a costly and lengthy implementation. With the digital fundamentally shifting the competitive landscape in many sectors, many organizations have no other choice but to innovate their digital transformation strategy in order to deepen relationships with customers and drive the empowerment of their own employees. Some are doing this by embarking on broad digital transformation journeys that include right-scaling their IT infrastructure investments and embracing a cloud-centric architecture. Others are heavily focused on how they can improve the ease of doing business and improve data access.
In keeping pace with the market, more and more companies are forced to rethink old operating models. This includes continuing to experiment with advanced technology in order to meet the evolving needs of customers while matching and exceeding the services of competitors 
There’s no right answer for every organization, but in looking across different sectors, here are several technology priorities that can play a big role in successful overhauls.
Cloud-centric architecture
This provides the underpinnings of the “as-a-service” model enabling dynamic elastic compute/storage, a unified data strategy, software-defined infrastructure, geo-redundancy, optimized technology operations, and collaboration amongst a highly distributed mobile workforce that can fuel company growth.
Secure enterprise
Another key is to leverage security technologies such as single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authorization (MFA), role management, user monitoring and open identity standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and Open Authorization (OAuth)—which help embrace identity as the new perimeter, giving users the convenience and the ease-of-use they seek while securing resources.
Data and intelligence platform
Keeping in mind that data is a critical asset, companies are creating modern data platforms by combining clean, connected, and authoritative data that is readily available and easy to understand so teams can create insights and intelligent experiences. The platform helps measure progress against strategic goals. For those amid application portfolio transformation, companies can leverage technologies like Kafka to provide low-latency, high-throughput, fault-tolerant publish and subscribe pipelines.
Digitized end-to-end processes
By enabling broader automation, organizations can position themselves to support the growing scale of business with streamlined customer onboarding processes that, in turn, tie into the company’s value-generating processes.
Service optimization
Customers and companies alike want access to more data, so enhanced reporting and analytics are a must. Offering a service delivery platform that is modern and cloud-based can help meet the highest standards for ease of use, performance, and online and offline mobility capability.
Productive enterprise
Employee training and engagement revolving around a specific mission can help define key priorities for investment and focus. This could include investing heavily in a “mobile-first” strategy as well as a host of collaboration-enabling tools that propel operational excellence, so team members have what they need when they need it. Significant productivity can be derived from transforming what is often a collection of isolated technologies to an interconnected digital platform.
Customer-centric culture
The key to growth and success is putting customers at the center of business strategy, including digital transformation.
There is no better time than now to jump on the digital bandwagon, and whether you are tired of hearing about digital transformation or only now starting to understand it—digital is here to stay. In keeping pace with the market, more and more companies are forced to rethink old operating models. This includes continuing to experiment with advanced technology in order to meet the evolving needs of customers while matching and exceeding the services of competitors.