Confronting the Business Bottleneck: Digital Strategy Beyond IT (Part 1)

"Digital transformation is a fancy term for customer innovation and operational excellence that drive financial results." —John Rymer and Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester Digital transformation is a strategic imperative for many organizations. They suffer "existential threats" from "tech companies." Thanks to DevOps, Agile, and Cloud, IT departments know how to operate like "tech companies." But do the rest of their organizations - "The Business" - know how to take advantage of these new capabilities? Based on real world case studies, this series explores the theory that business is now the bottleneck for digital transformation. There are a handful of enterprises that have broken the business bottleneck, like retailer, The Home Depot, that are figuring it out and thriving. There are more organizations, though, that are stumbling. IT isn’t the bottleneck anymore, it’s finance, strategy, and management. Part one explains this case, and part two will prescribe how organizations can break the bottleneck.