According to the IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2016 Predictions report, IT leadership will center on business needs, capabilities, and availability related to digital transformation. While this comes as little surprise to any CIO, the challenges still persist in quickly advancing a digital transformation strategy that encompasses the entire enterprise.

Of course, there are a number of key IT resources that CIOs can consistently leverage in order to bring about organizational change that enables digital transformations that can quickly make the business more competitive.

To that end, here are just three of the broader IT resources every New England CIO should have in their back pocket for enabling digital transformation:

1. Virtualization

From desktops and servers to storage and backup, virtualization technology provides a set of tools for increasing flexibility and lowering costs across an organization in multiple areas. By eliminating the need for specific physical hardware platforms, virtual IT resources enable the creation of new systems and services that foster quick innovation, actionable data and resource access, and fluent business process completion without respect to old business silos.

Some of the many ways that virtualization can be an important IT resource are through its ability to:

• Lower costs via server consolidation that creates a more powerful platform made up of virtual environments
• Reduce operating expenses via hardware reduction
• Reduce unused server capacity
• Improve application performance for the workforce
• Lower the maintenance expenses and total cost of ownership of IT infrastructures
• Decrease and eliminate planned and unplanned downtime with the ability to move workloads from one host to another
• Improve the end-user experience via the ability to migrate virtual servers and desktops between physical platforms without affecting user productivity

2. Content Management

When looking to improve your digital workplace, content management is one of the key IT resources that can facilitate the digital business by:

• Improving employee productivity and collaboration
• Improving employee engagement and information access
• Promoting workforce flexibility via information access for specific role performance
• Fostering a more efficient supply chain beyond the physical organization

Obviously, employees need the capability to share documents and content both internally and externally and to access information in the form of documents at the point of action. Without a cohesive plan for digital transformation, the tools for content management can be poorly implemented and haphazardly integrated in ways that hamper the digital business workflow. That means that CIOs need to have access to software tools that enable both enterprise content management (ECM) and digital asset management (DAM).

DAM systems centralize assets and establish a systematic approach to storing assets so that they can be located more easily and used appropriately. That differs from ECM systems, which tend to be large-scale repositories of many types of content held across the entire organization.

While an ECM system will hold materials other than just digital assets such as operational documents and files, its chief ability as an IT resource is in offering a single interface where employees can gain access to all of an organization’s data. Although technically an ECM system can function as a DAM system, in practice, most organizations and departments find they need a separate system, as ECM tends to be too broad for anything but basic activities such as searching.

In doing this, these organizations have realized the benefits of an end-to-end collaboration and ECM system that includes these capabilities:

• Manage all content resulting from collaboration (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, forms, images, etc.) used as part of the collaboration process
• The ability to enable users to continue to create and contribute content while in the ECM system and use it as the primary system for collaboration
• Configurable yet transparent content storage
• End-to-end content lifecycle management

3. Mobility

One of the key IT resources for CIOs is mobility and mobile solutions that are the basis for catering to clients, empowering employees, and optimizing supplier and partner relationships. Mobile is now a vital part of the CIO’s business technology agenda to help enhance customer experience, employee productivity, and new revenue channels.

Every CIO will need to provide the business with mobile solutions as part of a digital transformation. Mobility can have a number of moving parts in terms of software and protocols, ranging from enterprise mobility management and mobile device management to managed mobility services.

The connection between IT resources like virtualization, content management, and mobility is clear to any CIO in New England who has developed a sound digital transformation strategy. Realizing these major steps and the necessary security measures that they all entail often requires support from an experienced managed services provider.

This enables the CIO to have a wider use case of different solutions as well as the technical expertise to ensure fast and integrated implementation. The goal is to choose and implement IT resources that meet the needs of the business today while ensuring that they have the flexibility, agility, and scalability to meet tomorrow’s needs in a constantly changing digital landscape.