According to a new survey from InterSystems, despite more than one-third (36%) of UK CIOs admit they’re close to completing their journey to digital transformation, only 8% claim their organisation has fully optimised its digital approach.

“Many organisations are making the shift to digital, integrating new digital technologies and processes to transform the way they operate and do business while a lot of them are already a long way down the road with this process, but a large number are still finding it difficult to fully optimise their approach,” said Jon Payne, manager of Engineering and Education, InterSystems.

“There is clearly still a lot of work to do before they start reaping the rewards that digital transformation can bring to their organisation including the generation of new revenue streams or enhancing customer engagement.”

The survey highlighted some of the main challenges standing in the way of digital transformation which is hampering these changes among organisations. 38% of respondents ranked too much reliance on legacy systems among their top barriers, while 35% and 34% of respondents respectively said that it’s down to their technological infrastructure being too complex and difficulties managing and extracting intelligence from data kept in silos within the organisation is also an obstacle. 

“Many organisations find that their existing technological architectures are holding them back, making it difficult for them to extract data quickly, analyse it and start using it to advance their core business goals,” added Payne. “They are struggling to get the insight they need from the data quickly enough and that is hampering their business agility.”  

Supporting this point, 99% of CIOs, whose organisation has a digital transformation strategy, said that the ability to manage and extract data and then analyse it in real-time was important to the overall success of that strategy.

In line with this, it is a significant concern that more than a quarter of CIOs (28%) said their organisation was either completely or largely ineffective at using the right data at the right time to drive insight and decision-making.

“In our view, being able to manage data effectively and analyse it in real time to drive enhanced insight is key to long-term digital transformation success,” said Payne.

“That’s where we see a role, moving forwards for unified data platforms that can turn data into actionable insights that drive better business decisions and in turn fuel digital transformation itself.”