Every aspect of business is ‘going digital,’ and if it hasn’t already, it soon will. That’s because businesses generally understand how technology can directly impact the bottom line by making employees better informed, easier to reach, and more productive.
Strangely, the driving force behind this wave of enterprise “digitization” isn’t the enterprise — it’s the employees. Advanced technology proved that it was no longer the sole domain of deep-pocketed IT departments when it bypassed the enterprise and went straight to mainstream markets. Consumers liked what they could do on the new tablets and smartphones so much they spent their own money to buy them. Not surprisingly, once they had a taste of the new tech, they wanted the same technologies in their workplace.
Let me rephrase that: They demanded it. Yet, as McKinsey recently reported, many IT departments are having trouble satisfying this insatiable demand for new features:
Many companies are struggling to cope [with employee tech demands], and they seek to deliver on new demands by adding piecemeal elements to their existing operations.
IT departments are struggling because the task of cobbling together a patchwork of disparate systems — that were never designed to work together — is no simple task.
How digitization increases IT demands.
According to McKinsey, digitization changes the demands on IT in three principal ways:
- Digitization requires increasingly sophisticated technology. Tech is now a competitive advantage in itself, improving products, service, and providing insight.
- Digitization requires greater IT performance. Time-to-market is critical now, and businesses compete on how quickly they get digital innovations to consumers.
- Digitization must have more engagement and oversight. New tech needs to be adopted company-wide and help with strategic decision-making and innovation.
As a result these new demands, new companies that were “born digital” have a huge business advantage in that they lack legacy systems and processes. New companies can design their IT infrastructure to support these objectives right from Day One.
For more established companies, however, these are huge, budget-shattering changes. Their IT departments have to find a way to either integrate existing systems effectively or scrap them entirely and start over, incurring huge costs. Luckily, there’s a solution.
IT needs to adapt or (the company will) die.
Somewhere between the ‘patchwork’ approach and the ‘starting over’ approach there’s the tibbr platform approach.
tibbr is an integration platform disguised as an enterprise social network. It brings together all of the business apps people use with all of the social features people want — including updates, chat, photo- and file-sharing, etc. — and it makes them all accessible from the web or virtually any smart device with the award-winning tibbr Mobile app.
While there is an on-premise option, our scalable and secure cloud deployment option lets IT departments instantly provide the latest and greatest social features that employees are demanding. It’s a simple, turn-key approach to help companies keep up with competitor’s offerings.
To learn how tibbr can help your IT department offer employees the features they want without having to start from scratch, get a free trial of the tibbr platform now.
