Throughout Q4 2021, technology leaders on Pulse were actively engaging in discussions around digital transformation (DX). In this post, we’ve selected five digital transformation questions from the Pulse community that cover everything from challenges to IT budgets. Here’s what’s top-of-mind for tech leaders as 2022 approaches:

Top challenges with DX

Which of the following are the top two challenges to digital transformation in your enterprise?

View poll on the Pulse community

Since Q2 2021, legacy systems (64%) and resource/budgets (56%) have consistently been the top two challenges in digital transformation for enterprise companies.

Predicting the future of digital transformation adoption

Do you agree with IDC’s DX prediction: by 2023, 75% of organizations will have comprehensive digital transformation implementation roadmaps, up from 27% today.

View poll on the Pulse community

An overwhelming amount of participants (74%) agree that digital transformation roadmaps will significantly mature over the next two years.

Digital transformation budgets for 2022

What percentage of your IT budget do you plan to spend on digital transformation technologies in 2022?

View poll on the Pulse community 

Next year, 45% of tech leaders plan to spend between 11-25% of their overall IT budgets on digital transformation technologies.

Company culture and DX success

How much does culture impact the success of digital transformations?

View Q&A on the Pulse community

“...culture is across anything a company's trying to do. And it's not a digital transformation or an IT transformation. It's a business transformation. But it’s like conversations about diversity: ‘Diversity's really important—HR, could you go fix that?’ It’s like thinking of security as just an IT thing that you don't need to worry about yourself. 

There are all these elements of getting the right champions but if it’s not important to the highest levels of the organization, even culture won't make it happen. That's a key theme across all of these issues.”

–⁠ Julie Cullivan, Former Chief Technology and People Officer at Forescout Technologies 

“At the beginning of digital transformation, the problem was people's reluctance to change. But it's not the people, it's the culture in which you can't change a process because it’s been done that way for 50 years, or it doesn't exist anymore. That's where we see the biggest impact of culture because people will not be reluctant to adopt something new if you show them the benefit of it for themselves.”

–⁠ Joanne Friedman, CEO at Connektedminds

“Gartner did a report on CIOs breaking through cultural barriers to enable digital transformation [...and] 64% saw culture as a barrier. So three-quarters of the companies out there have a culture that stifles their innovation. That’s going to cause companies to really struggle. We have to watch out for what I call the ‘cloud adoption antibodies’. It's a way of saying, ‘We've always done it this way, why do we need to change?’ Culture is the number one thing that will either make or break a major business transformation enabled through digital.”

–⁠ Declan Morris, AWS Transformation Advisor, Investor, and former CIO at Splunk

Customizing digital transformation strategies

How do I tailor digital transformation to fit my organization?

View Q&A on the Pulse community

“You have to start with answering these questions: What are the processes we're using? How old are those processes? Do they need to be refreshed? It's not just necessarily cloud, but I look at digital transformation in terms of maybe a modernization or a re-fabrication or something that's going to change the way you're doing business today, to a way that makes the most sense in the present. And that's the lens through which I look at a digital transformation and the lens through which I look at the vision required to get you to where you need to be, using today's technology.”

–⁠ Howard Miller, CIO at UCLA Anderson School of Management

“...there really is no out-of-the-box program, just approaches that will help you. Start with who your customers are and what do they need, then work through how to satisfy them and the connected internal business processes. Think carefully about the cultural change needed to become properly focused on the customer first; only then start looking at technology to help.”

–⁠ Martin Davis, CIO at Mevotech