Digital? Hardly anyone's actually doing it, says BMC Software's Steve Hamilton

"Very few organisations have become truly agile," claims Hamilton at BMC Exchange

Regardless of the hype over the shift to ‘digital', hardly any organisations have actually made the shift, and most are in the earliest, most tentative stages of their moves towards full digitalisation, claims BMC Software sales director Steve Hamilton.

Speaking at Thursday's BMC Software Digital IT Exchange event in Twickenham, London, Hamilton claimed that despite the hype, most organisations remained almost at the starting gate, with initiatives stalled by a combination of legacy and a lack of drive from the top-down.

"Many organisations, when you ask them, will say that they have shifted to a more digital bias - they have digital initiatives and are working on ‘high-speed innovation'," Hamilton said. "But if you look at the data behind it, very few organisations have become truly agile. Very few organisations are delivering new services on an almost real-time basis," he added.

There are a number of reasons for this, he continued, the first being a lack of a genuinely digital mindset from the very top down. Part of that is down to how C-level executives can "create a truly modern, elastic and agile business", he added.

Companies like insurer Aviva, he went on, have already been forced by competitive pressures, such as the rise of price-comparison websites, into becoming more digital. "Aviva has leveraged the power of automation to create this environment of agile application delivery as it brings new services and digital capabilities to both its employees and customers," said Hamilton.

Implicit in the shift to digital, he added, is devops. Or, at the least, "an incredibly close partnership between the operations of IT and the delivery of digital innovation. The CIO and the business have to work far more closely together. Strategy and planning has to be done close together with, obviously, a bias towards optimising for a digital future.

"So, of course, IT has to move, not just at the speed of the business, but of the customer. IT's thinking has to evolve and transform internally, creating an agile, interactive environment. But the business has to understand that there's a governance requirement that's absolutely critical to the new digital services they want to provide.

"How can you be sure that you can provide them at scale, speed, trust in a secure, stable and available environment? So the business needs to understand that there's an incredibly important element there that comes together from an IT operations perspective," said Hamilton.

BMC Software, one of the largest software companies in the world, is 36 years old and was taken private in 2013.