Dive Brief:

• IT departments consider technology troubleshooting their top broken IT process and are using digital transformation to address it, according to a Nintex survey of more than 1,000 decision makers involved in digital transformation decisions and line of business employees. Locating documents followed by document sharing are the top broken management processes.

• Larger companies with 50,000 or more employees are more than twice as likely to have a mature digital transformation plan, compared to companies with only 250 to 1,000 employees. A majority of formalized plans, 88%, have process automation and intelligent capabilities.

• Transformation is derailed almost equally by a lack of interdepartmental communications strategies, IT bottlenecks and insufficiently training line of business employees on new tech, according to the report. Failure to meet digital transformation expectations is due to a lack of executive buy-in, in-house talent and transformation-specific leadership.

Dive Insight:

Companies are coupling digital transformation maturation with hires required to carry out the plans. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents hired candidates purely for digital transformation, though some of the roles are not relegated to just IT specialists, according to the report. Roles include IT, project managers and growth strategists or consultants.

Expectedly, respondents said hiring transformation-specific specialists is tougher than hiring "typical employees." But hiring employees to support digital transformation can only take a company so far if leadership isn't also bought in.

Clear communication is the foundation of any type of change in an organization. For IT, technology leaders need to talk to senior executives, middle managers and frontline employees for information gathering to lock down what the business cares about, according to F. Christian Byrnes, managing VP at Gartner, while speaking at a Gartner event in June.

IT employees have to equip themselves with knowing what's important to the people who matter. Budget is less of an issue if tech leaders communicate what they're trying to do to service the business.

But Byrnes warns that it can take a minimum of two years to "approximate culture change" because "these things are not technology dependent, they are culturally dependent."

Organizations are used to working in a "shoot from the hip" fashion, Byrnes said, where they try to solve a problem and then move onto another and work independently. But cultural issues are not ones that can be changed quickly, leaving room for resistance.