Only a small proportion are making progress towards digitization, with just eight percent “fully digitised.”
Analytics firm Ovum spoke to 6,300 enterprises globally to collect the data for its latest ICT Enterprise Insights program. The company asked senior IT leaders to assess their organisation’s performance in nine key facets of digital transformation. These included access to skills, use of emerging technologies and the ability to respond to cybersecurity incidents.
The data was then combined to create a “digital maturity progression index” for each of the industries involved. The results show that telecoms, banking and utility firms are currently the most digitally advanced. The telecoms industry achieved a 43.9 percent progression index score, followed by banking at 42.0 percent.
At the other end of the scale, government, healthcare and media are further away from achieving digital transformation. The government sector is lagging behind the most with a progression index of 37.3 percent. Political pressure and a lack of agility when introducing new technologies are some of the problems faced by governments trying to digitally transform.
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Ovum’s data supports other recent studies that have revealed enterprise optimism around new technologies. The IT executives surveyed expressed an interest in big data-based technologies and IoT-powered systems. However, there are signs that less familiar technologies are still struggling to get established. Firms are either unable to access sufficient resources or fail to see how new concepts could help their business.
Data lakes and big data platforms are having a significant impact with strong interest from companies and a high level of deployments. IoT has similar attention but is far less broadly deployed. AI and machine learning sits towards the middle on the graph, with deployments relatively high but interest low compared to data-driven alternative technologies. Businesses are yet to find use cases for AI outside of the industries where innovation is being focused.
Globally, Ovum found that just 8 percent of businesses consider themselves to be fully digitised and only 23 percent have begun to implement a strategy. This suggests there’s much more to do before digitisation is widespread across every industry. Finance and telecoms are likely to become models for other kinds of business, providing examples of successful strategies.
