The following blog post was written by Avanade alum Leigh Schvartz.

Are you one of those people that competes at everything? I’m guilty of it. I compete with myself, I compete with other competitors, and I even compete with those that don’t know we are competing. Whether it is work or personal, I’m always looking for that measuring stick that tells me how I’m doing and whether I’m in the lead.
 
In business though, it’s sometimes hard to measure success. You might be able to track your own results but how do those compare to your competitors? Are you creating a competitive advantage for your business or just struggling to keep up?

The key aspects of IT modernization 
To help our clients along the journey to modernization, we’ve split it into four chunks, aligning to how modernization initiatives are often carried out – some of which will likely be more advanced than others. However, a holistic approach across these four areas is critical to ensure you maintain a healthy balance and don’t let any fall far behind. 

In the tool today, we focus on the first three: 
• Application Modernization
• Infrastructure Modernization
• Workplace Modernization
• Process Modernization 

Using the four to assess your journey so far
When we review progress against the four with our clients, we work from what is often a typical journey through from ‘legacy’ to ‘conventional’ to ‘modernized’. We help assess where they are today, and what the likely next steps are to get them where they need to be in order to initiate, or support, business digital transformation. 

The tool does a similar job. You answer four questions on your progress and we’ll give you a rough indication of where you’d fall on the journey (legacy, conventional or modernized). Then, dig into the details of exactly how you answered each question and where your progress compares to the 800 senior IT decision makers we surveyed earlier this year. You may find you are ahead of the majority in some areas, behind in some and roughly on-par in others, helping you address potential weaker spots or showcase back to your business stakeholders where you are leading the way.

Conventional... good enough? Not if you want your 14%
65% of survey respondents told us that conventional systems and approaches are not fit for purpose in addressing the emerging requirements of the digital business. IT leaders are striving for modernized, as they recognize it as critical in empowering digital transformation in their businesses. Survey respondents also told us that they believed modernized IT systems and approaches could boost annual revenue by 14% - for the organizations we surveyed that was over $1 billion per year. 

Modernized IT isn’t the end goal
Key to this tool, and this research, is that modernized IT in itself isn’t the end goal. Modernized IT is the enabler, without which digital transformation cannot happen to its fullest potential. 

Speaking of digital, I hope you’ll enjoy our attempt at digitizing the results of this survey in a way that you can compare and contrast your progress with the 800 senior IT decision makers we spoke to.

Take the test and see how you measure up today. Oh, and by the way, I was the first one to complete it!