How are top companies optimising their tech?
McKinsey noted the ways companies can optimise their tech organisations.
Most companies are investing in technology to drive future growth and are already benefiting from their transformation efforts; however, according to McKinsey's global survey of technology and business leaders, there’s still a significant gap between the best tech transformations and the rest.
The report from McKinsey has looked at the responses from financially successful organisations, which they referred to as “top performers.”
According to respondents, these companies are further along than others in optimising their technology organisations in the following ways, all of which can boost a tech transformation’s likelihood of success: modernize architecture and platforms, build a future-ready tech talent pool, eliminate operating-model silos, demonstrate clear business value from tech investments.
Modernise architecture and platforms
The report noted that to overcome the often slow delivery of IT solutions that stem from legacy architecture and platforms, top performers are investing more than others in cutting-edge technology, including cloud.
Three-quarters of top performers said that their companies are adopting cloud at scale—that is, a full or large-scale transformation in which all eligible workloads are migrated and/or refactored—compared with just one-third of all other respondents.
This aligns with McKinsey’s findings from the previous survey, in which 61% of top performers—compared with half of other respondents—said they were investing in infrastructure, including cloud.
Moreover, McKinsey also noted that 52% of top performers also tend to have strong FinOps capabilities compared with only 27% of other respondents who said that there’s still room for improvement.
Only 18% of the top performers report expert FinOps capabilities, such as high visibility into cloud spending and dynamic forecasting.
Build a future-ready tech talent pool
According to the survey, top performers are pursuing a higher number of talent strategies than others are, most often focusing on reskilling, training, and development at scale.
Moreover, they are more likely than others to say their companies have transformed their talent, partnerships, and capabilities in the past two years—and more likely (50% versus 37%) to say they will continue transforming their talent management in the years ahead.
In terms of hiring needs, McKinsey noted that respondents at both the top performers and all other companies are most focused on cybersecurity roles, followed by roles in project and/or program management.
Top performers place more emphasis on hiring for cloud roles, with 28% reporting this focus compared to 19% of others.
Eliminate operating-model silos
The top performers are even further ahead than their peers in their commitment to technology and in the ways of working that best support it, according to the survey.
Top-performer respondents are more than twice as likely as other respondents to say their engineering teams are organised in product- or platform-centric operating models.
In addition to breaking down silos between tech and the business, these types of operating models create a range of business benefits, such as reducing time to market, reducing the costs of tech solutions, and enforcing greater accountability on the part of both business and tech.
Demonstrate clear business value from tech investments
According to the report, the top performers are more effective than others at executing specific transformation initiatives or “plays” and at realising the business value they’re seeking as a result.
In seven of the eight plays McKinsey surveyed on modernising infrastructure, top performers view their technology organisations as more effective.
Additionally, they intend to invest further across nearly all plays, particularly in areas like cybersecurity, talent, and advancing a technology-driven business strategy.
Last year, the report found that most top performers had focused on future-proofing their foundation in the past two years.
