In the 21st century, a wave of digitization has boosted the development of the global economy and ushered in leapfrog changes.
Looking at the world today, every industry—from banking, manufacturing, retail, media entertainment, to education—has begun to actively execute a digital strategy. As a result, there is a growing trend of transformation from traditional businesses to fully digital and automated enterprises.
With the power of digital, businesses will focus on user experience while reshaping the technology foundation to create more value. However, constrained by limited budgets and a shortage of technical talent, many companies are choosing to rest on their core businesses and innovate only at the edge.
Conservative business operating models and cultures, characterized by a lack of adaptable risk management and security strategies, applications and infrastructure that rely on human intervention, and lack of insightful technical capabilities, have become a liability to business growth. As digital transformation drives enterprises toward the goal of adaptability, enterprises need to rely on the application of innovative technologies to solve the pain points in the above areas in order to improve the efficiency and speed of enterprises, release enterprise adaptability and innovation capabilities, and lead the realization of digital transformation.
In 2019, we published a three-phase digital transformation framework, which the subsequent years (including a pandemic) have borne out. Digital transformation continues to advance, and digitization is driving business innovation. At the heart of digital transformation is innovation through optimizing business and technology. Even if digital transformation has become the main theme of enterprise strategic transformation, enterprises that want to use digital transformation to lead change need to identify their own technical capabilities and understand the characteristics of each stage of enterprise development, so as to create a customized transformation strategy.
We divide the digital transformation development of enterprises into three stages:
With research from F5's State of Application Strategy 2022 Report and numerous industry examples, we know that most enterprises today are in the second phase of their digital transformation, which is characterized by a focus on modernizing applications and operations, and a growing desire to adopt cloud and edge technologies to accelerate innovation.
The urgent pursuit of digital transformation makes the advancement of new digital IT architectures inevitable, but today's mainstream enterprise architectures lack the necessary factors of agility, scale, security, and observability, which are the key to driving technological change and circumventing increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
Therefore, we have summarized the six core technical capabilities that enterprises must have to help them cope with the risks and challenges they face in the process of digital transformation.
For CIO and IT leaders, accelerating digital transformation requires thinking about how the company's technology capabilities match their business strategy to help them move forward in an evolving environment and ultimately achieve digital transformation.
This article excerpts from a new book by F5’s Lori MacVittie, Distinguished Engineer and Principal Technical Evangelist, and Geng Lin, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Enterprise Architecture for Digital Business: Transforming IT.