What is the Digital Transformation Chasm?

A little more than 10 years ago, a startup called Airbnb listed its first rooms and took its first bookings. Four years later, 10 million people had stayed at an Airbnb-listed property. By 2017, the company has hosted more than 200 million guests from properties in over 191 countries. Airbnb is now worth $31 billion—more than the Marriott group, and more than twice as much as Hilton Worldwide. 

The successful road to cloud migration entails much more than simply running an application or service from the cloud. There are many considerations involved and preparing your organization to utilize the cloud effectively is paramount. 

Years ago, the appropriate response might have been to defend market share or focus on a niche, but this was only true when there were few major players in an industry. Today, however, you could be competing with the store down the road as well as the e-commerce giant on the other side of the globe. Technology is also turning many business conventions on their heads, like the notion that you have to lower service levels to cut costs. Not true in the digital age. Tech-native competitors can offer the lowest prices, fastest deliveries, and widest selections thanks to its aggressive adoption of digital technologies. 

With digital, it’s winner takes all. Anyone else left standing would be fighting over scraps. 

We know that digital transformation needs to start with IT, but unfortunately, many IT leaders have their hands tied. They’re too busy maintaining the status quo, they lack the resources to modernize and innovate, and they lack the expertise to implement best-in-class practices like agile. The result is a toxic environment of low integration, low speed, low skills, and high run cost. 

This gap of systems, skills, readiness, budget, and speed between a business’s digital future and its current state is what we call the digital transformation chasm. Crossing it, and becoming a modern digital business, is the only way to survive.