In today’s ultra-competitive world of commerce, business leaders are coming under mounting pressure to move their enterprises to the next level by driving organisational, operational, and business model innovation and creating new ways of operating and growing their businesses.

Increasingly, they are turning to digital technologies to facilitate these goals — a process that is now widely referred to as ‘digital transformation’. It’s a term that has entered common parlance over the last few years and can be heard in boardrooms all around the world. But what does it really mean and who should take the lead?

In short, ‘digital transformation’ can be defined as the continuous process by which enterprises adapt to or drive disruptive changes in their customers and markets (i.e., the external ecosystems in which they operate).

In order to accomplish this, enterprises leverage digital competencies to innovate new business models and deliver products and services that seamlessly blend the digital and physical worlds with business and customer experiences, all while improving operational efficiencies and organisational performance.

When one considers where we have come from in such a short space of time, this level of progress is quite remarkable. In just a few decades, IT has moved from the back office (first platform) to the front office (second platform) and, finally, embedded itself into nearly every aspect of our business and personal lives.

Fuelled by third platform technologies such as cloud, mobility, and big data analytics, we’re entering an era where the distinction between the technologies and processes that businesses deploy is so tightly linked to customers and markets that the boundary between the internal operations of the enterprise and its external ecosystem is rapidly disappearing.

Given the dependence on both technology and information that is required to enable a successful transformation process, it’s only logical that IT heads and CIOs should play an important role. However, our research suggests that this isn’t always the case.

If we start from the premise that how you spend your time at work directly correlates to the outcomes you can achieve, the data is quite revealing. Indeed, based on surveys conducted with CIOs around the world, there appears to be a gap between what they are currently focused on and what they could be doing to drive digital transformation across their organisations.

Our data shows that CIOs currently spend 42 per cent of their time with IT staff, 18 per cent with vendors, and 40 per cent with their line-of-business (LoB) peers. It is that final percentage that is perhaps the biggest cause for concern.

As any business moves deeper into the digital transformation process, time spent with vendors will be critical for understanding emerging technologies and managing sourcing relationships. But are CIOs spending enough time with their LoB peers, and is that time being spent effectively?

To drive innovation with their business-focused counterparts, CIOs must spend more time trying to understand their problems and issues. Only then can they make themselves invaluable to the digital transformation process by enabling innovative technologies and services that truly help to transform the business.

To that end, I strongly encourage IT leaders to not only improve their responsiveness to and relationship with LoBs, but also to educate their business colleagues on the critical role that IT has to play as an enabler of digital transformation.

As the third platform dramatically changes the way we conduct business, most organisations are still focused on the second platform priorities of optimisation and process improvement rather than on driving innovation, creating new products and services, and improving the customer experience.

This is something that has to change; but, while many IT leaders already recognise the need to improve their communications with leadership and the wider business, many of their LoB peers remain far too entrenched in the operational aspects of IT.

So, while undergoing their own transformation, IT leaders must also help their business partners to transform their own departments. This will provide a perfect opportunity to demonstrate tangible business value by driving innovation in products, services, experience, and insight, thereby becoming a genuine leader of the digital transformation process.

As the pressure mounts on businesses to reinvent the customer experience and fend off the emergence of lean new competitors, it is indisputable that digital transformation is now critical to ensuring the future well-being of every enterprise — and that IT is key to making it happen.

The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC. Content for this week’s feature leverages global, regional, and local research studies undertaken by IDC.