IT knows digital—and they don’t call it digital transformation for nothing.

Digital transformation is on every organization’s agenda. (And if it isn’t, it should be.) But where to start? Easy. Because IT lives and breathes digital, IT can act as the technology experts best positioned to assess and implement digital transformation.

Here are the challenges to tackle—and the opportunities that arise—when IT takes the transformation lead.

You’ll need a fresh take on IT—and the right tools to execute

The days of keeping IT sequestered in a dark corner of the enterprise are gone. Today, IT is an increasingly vital business partner with a direct impact on productivity, operations and other business-related issues.

Emerging technologies like AI and machine learning play a big part in helping IT innovate and improve business outcomes. But too many organizations are held back by their current IT technology investments. Some prime culprits that hold IT back are:

• Legacy “solutions” that never lived up to their promise
• The recurring overhead of maintaining interoperability
• Multiple data models that limit the ability to work across the IT value chain

IT resources are drained by too many integrations and their maintenance, taking funds and attention away from more important work. And multiple data models keep people working within “closed” teams and tools, making it difficult to aggregate data to understand and improve performance.

These legacy solutions, complex integrations and multiple data models not only result in suboptimal decisions, operations and business outcomes, they also result in poor experiences for everyone. For digital transformations to succeed, something has to give in terms of the current IT experience.

You’ll need one platform to unite your organization

A single IT platform—powered by a unified data model, shared intelligence, best practice workflows, AI capabilities and a common look and feel—is the key to improving processes and creating efficiencies. With the right platform in place, organizations can:

• Get the insight they need to innovate quickly and strategically
• Align their IT activities and spend to business priorities
• Deliver a better, modernized employee experience

When you can deliver innovation at speed, the entire company can move fast and build things—a key ingredient of digital transformation. An example of this is “intelligent change management,” in which policies, and their automated application, take the risk out of the change process and optimize speed.

By aligning IT with business priorities, you can optimize IT investments—something best achieved through a single view of project and service data. Solutions like the Now Platform®, with both portfolio management and service management applications and a single database, deliver the insight you need to put applications, budgets, demand and labor where your priorities are.

Technology-enabled employee experiences are the key to boosting productivity—and making work work better for everyone in the business. With the right platform, IT can drive this in multiple ways, including:

• Virtual assistants to free up staff time by automating tasks when appropriate
• Intelligent automation to speed up the assessment, categorization, prioritization and routing of requests
• Predictive intelligence for faster incident resolution and higher agent productivity
• Machine learning and automation to pinpoint and resolve issues before they impact end users

The bottom line

Transforming IT should be the first step of your digital transformation strategy—and your IT team should lead the way. They’ve got the technological expertise and deep understanding of your organization’s business goals necessary to implement real and lasting positive change not only for IT, but for HR, customer service, security and every corner of the enterprise. And that’s what will set your company up for ongoing innovation and success.

Put simply, if you’re looking for better business outcomes, put IT at the head of your transformation efforts.

Ready to embark on your own digital transformation journey? Discover how ServiceNow can help you transform your organization by transforming IT. For more insights into how technology is transforming businesses visit Workflow.

Original Article published on Forbes

Written by ServiceNow

Used with permission