Enterprises blame networks for stalled digital transformation - Verizon report

A new report from US telco Verizon claims that the majority of decision makers in enterprises blame the network for disappointing customers, with condemnation of the existing network technology almost unanimous.

The report concludes that 79 per cent of decision makers think that expensive downtime and poor user experience is the fault of the IT department.

Verizon compiled the Digital Transformation Powers Your Business report on the back of a Forrester Research study it commissioned. In February 2015 the researchers spoke to ‘more than’ 600 decision makers at large enterprises and multinational corporations in North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

The telco claims the report examines the issues facing enterprises during the digital evolution.

It identifies the key areas of digital transformation as cloud computing, mobile, IoT, big data analytics and virtual reality-collaboration systems. However, the organisation of these lines of business needs improving, the report concluded, after the Forrester study found that 67 per cent of enterprise decision makers said that each line of business has a different own definition of digital technology.

There is more clarity of purpose about service priorities, however, with 80 per cent of the survey agreeing that improving customer experience is a ‘key priority’. Figures were not provided for what the other 20 per cent of the survey identified as a key priority.

Around three quarters of the survey group (74 per cent) blamed poor network quality as the main cause for poor user experience.

This, according to Verizon’s report, highlighted the need for better technology at the heart of enterprises, such as software defined networking. Currently, only 15 per cent of the businesses quizzed already use some form of networks function virtualisation to manage their services. However, Verizon’s report predicts this proportion will rise to 90 per cent in the next two years.

The most worrying statistic, for telecom managers, was possibly that 79 per cent of the surveyed decision makers think that it is the IT department’s responsibility to ensure that a company’s network can support its digital transformation plans.