Leveraging IT Investments for Digital Strategy

Technology depreciation and digital strategy

Technology depreciation and digital strategy are two important factors that are closely related in the context of customer or employee experiences, new business offerings, efficiencies, use cases and revenue.

As technology assets decline over time, organizations must account for the decreasing value of their assets and plan for replacements or upgrades as needed. These assets will eventually become outdated, restrictive and less valuable as they go through OEM end-of-life and support. Ultimately, such assets end up losing their alignment with the business's competitive landscape and strategic direction, which can perpetuate IT departments' reputation as a cost center versus a profit enabler.

IT leaders and digital strategists can partner to leverage both core and digital technologies to make impactful changes to the way organizations operate and deliver value to customers — internally and externally. This journey involves reimagining and potentially redesigning processes, strategies and operating models to deliver on the full potential of their investments. The process often encompasses the use of new technologies, such as cloud computing, analytics, artificial intelligence, automation, security, software, networking, wireless, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve efficiency, innovation and customer and employee experiences.

Operational and strategic alignment

Let's consider the example of a network refresh that had fully depreciated and was sunsetting for a client.

Prior to the environment fully depreciating, the client's IT leadership wisely took time to reflect on the strategic contribution their new enterprise network could make to the business. They realized that if they aligned their network investments to the organization's business objectives, they could meet both their internal operational and external strategic requirements:

• First, IT could refresh the depreciated enterprise network to meet their internal customers' everyday working requirements.
• Second, IT could enable new lines of revenue in support of the company's new digital offerings.

By ensuring alignment between IT and business goals, the IT team positioned itself as a critical enabler of the overall customer experience. Moreover, aligning information technology, investments and digital strategy to the business further rewarded the client with an improved competitive advantage, economies of scale, and executive support in scaling diagonally or "future-proofing" the business for growth.

It can help to think of this vision of alignment as a three-legged stool. Without the seat and legs aligned and working together, the stool would be unbalanced and ineffective at achieving its core purpose.

Execution and approach

The execution of a digital project involves carrying out the planned activities and tasks to achieve the objectives within an organization's defined scope, timeline and budget. While execution on a single path is important, adopting a lateral approach that executes across multiple paths is critical for digital projects. 

At WWT we align and execute across the business, digital, data and technology paths to deliver on our clients' goals for digital experiences and outcomes.

Getting started

There is a good chance that digital strategies and projects are already going on in different areas of your organization, including the IT department. In fact, your organization may be strategizing on your next digital offerings for improved customer or employee experiences. Wherever you are in your digital journey, WWT can help you take it to the next level. 

Digital transformation requires strategy, enablement and execution. We can help you build an actionable strategy that aligns business value with technology. By aligning IT teams and their investments to value streams, we can help drive business outcomes.