Transforming German Enterprises for Competitive Advantage

As more and more German enterprises address the need to transform their business models, the move to cloud technology is picking up volume and pace across the country. Not only can it help lower operational costs, it can act as the foundation for speed and innovation. This means its impact is felt far beyond IT, and is a matter of organizational change. However, where some enterprises are using the cloud to their advantage and accelerating ahead of their competitors, others are struggling to adopt this same momentum. In my experience, this has largely been down to the laborious task of navigating a long established and complex IT infrastructure.

From technology and security to operational and financial issues, many decision-makers lack the know-how required to break down these barriers and apply the technology to help them transform their business to cope with the new pace. This means there’s now a high demand for boardrooms to bridge their digital skills gap and gain an in-depth understanding of how to become an enterprise capable of managing high speed change.

In Germany specifically, we’re helping enterprises meet this demand via a program we developed called Executive Visioning. In these sessions, we work with customers to deeply understand what they want to achieve and how we can help get them there. More often than not, the solution is supported by cloud technology. By collaborating with cloud partners, enterprises can not only tune up their frequencies and accelerate their digital transformations, they can also build upon their in-house capabilities and enable continuous business improvement.

Becoming high-frequency is a prerequisite for success, but only when it’s born from the desire to drive real business value, and not from the pressure of market disruptors. Done right, it can significantly reduce time to market, giving enterprises additional differentiation in a competitive environment – where customers expect applications, products and services to be delivered yesterday.

To be a high-frequency enterprise means to be a cloud-integrated one. After all, cloud technology is a proven way to improve business speed and agility. Yet, what many German enterprises don’t realize is, their cloud transformations are likely to fail if they continue to position their IT as a cost center. Instead of being CFO-driven, they need to focus on ROI and the incremental capabilities a digital business model could bring them.

In his eBook “Tuning Up the High-frequency Enterprise,” Phil Potloff, Head of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, discusses the patterns associated with slow-moving enterprises and the keys areas to focus on in order to achieve a high speed digital transformation.