It's often talked about, but what does digital transformation really mean?

Well, first of all it means change. The flip side of digital transformation is digital disruption. The nature of change, of course, is that it doesn't happen in gradual increments. It happens in abrupt and disruptive leaps. The term 'digital transformation' describes the abrupt and disruptive change now underway and being driven by technology advances coming together in a particularly powerful synergy. Essentially, digital transformation describes the opportunity to take advantage of change rather than being the victim of change.

Although we've been able to predict the availability of cheap high-speed Internet and of connected devices with dramatically faster and cheaper processors and memory, it's been hard to predict what that will mean in terms of disruption to traditional business models. It's only when we see the new business models emerging that we appreciate the difference between incremental change and explosive transformation. Just think of Uber in the taxi industry, or Airbnb in hospitality. Accountants are currently feeling the pinch with Xero on the market replacing many of the chargeable services that they would historically offer. We can now see that every industry and business is faced with rapid and disruptive change and the speed of that change is around the removal of complexity and the ability to deliver richer services to consumers at less cost.

We recently hosted a Digital Transformation Events Series in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise during March which was a huge success – with around 200 CodeBlue customers attending events held in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hawke's Bay and Hamilton.

Guests in all five locations turned up to hear about the trends, key drivers and opportunities of digital transformation and were entertained and given food for thought in equal measure through diverse yet complementary presentations from HPE NZ CTO, David Eaton (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch), HPE NZ Director – Channels and SMB Cedric Edwards (Hawke's Bay and Hamilton), and Aamplify Managing Partner, Samuel Williams.

Essentially, the digital transformation era delivers enormous opportunities for New Zealand businesses, but ones that require non-traditional approaches in order to capitalise on it.

More information

In our April 2016 Deep Blue blog, CodeBlue Christchurch Virtual CIO Mike Tarjomi discusses how CodeBlue supports and enables digital transformation in practical terms by tightly linking IT infrastructure optimisation with the high-level strategic elements inherent in CodeBlue's CIO Services capability and philosophy. Read the blog.

CodeBlue - HPE Digital Transformation Events Series: Read the review.

Digital transformation powers world-leading online news service at the Blind Foundation: Read the case study.