To gather the necessary data for the review, Infosys polled more than 1,000 senior management executives who are based in organizations globally with more than 5,000 employees and with in excess of $1 billion in annual revenue.
Infosys is the second-largest Indian IT company and it provides business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services.
The analysis allowed the consultancy firm to take an in-depth look at how businesses are performing along their digital journey. The report is titled “Infosys Digital Radar 2019: Barriers and Accelerators for Digital Transformation.”
From the analysis, the various businesses were classified into three categories, based on twenty-two key digital initiatives. The initiates were further subdivided into four areas. First were foundation initiatives, which describes programs that are implemented to modernize legacy systems. Second were mainstay initiatives, which describes practices focused on core digital transformation elements such as automation and artificial intelligence. The third initiative was customer initiatives, which means focusing on improving the customer experience. The fourth and final one was forefront initiatives. This latter initiative is all about harnessing leading technologies, such as augmented and virtual reality, drones and ledger based blockchain.
The resultant categories were:
Watchers. This means companies who still see technology primarily as an enabler of efficiency.
Explorers. This refers to companies who express great interest in digital initiatives but have not yet used digital means to transform their business models.
Visionaries. These are companies who act decisively to seize the opportunities that digital technologies offer.
Based on this new classification system, Infosys have further developed a new type of measuring tool and framework that can assist businesses to navigate their transformation journey. The framework is additionally designed to offer a blueprint to aid businesses to make the leap from being mere watchesr to becoming digital transformation visionaries.
The major problem that companies face when attempting to embark on digital transformation journeys is a lack of holistic focus on the four key sub-areas; too often there is a tendency just to focus on one area. This is often to the detriment of the customer.
Barriers to digital transformation were also assessed in the report, and these were found to be an inability to experiment quickly; insufficient budget; and being hampered by legacy systems. Furthermore, a lack of change management capabilities and relevant skills was also called out as a significant block.
