There’s a great deal of business hype around digital change, so it might come as a surprise that, in a recent global survey of IT professionals, just eight percent of enterprises evaluate themselves as truly digitally transformed. In addition, 23 percent consider themselves to be locked in the early stages of their ‘digital transformation’.
The new survey comes from Ovum, and the report is titled “ICT Enterprise Insights 2018”. Enabling digital technologies that Ovum considers necessary for most organizations who take the path to digital transformation include Big Data, blockchain, IoT, platform architecture/APIs, artificial intelligence (AI), and microservices.
For the research, the survey looked at the path taken by enterprises towards their digital transformation goals and evaluated success using a ‘maturity score’. This is a common measure used in larger enterprises. The term “maturity” relates to the degree of formality and optimization of processes, from ad hoc practices, to formally defined steps, to managed result metrics, to active optimization of the processes.
While the survey revealed that few companies (less than one in ten) had achieved their digital transformation goals, the most advanced sector was telecoms. Second on the list was banking. This was based on an assessment of a range of factors, such as tackling cybersecurity, developing digital skills, creating the necessary organization structure and culture. Also include were digitizing processes, creating digital services, to having a clear digital strategy.
The future is not bleak for businesses, however. Many organizations are adopting a step-by-step approach to digital transformation. Three aspects of this are outlined in the Digital Journal article “What’s next for businesses attempting digital transformation?“
