The Obstacles of the Race towards Digital Transformation
According to the report “Are Businesses Really Digitally Transforming or Living in Digital Denial”, 85% of business decision makers believe they have a period of just two years to achieve significant breakthroughs in their digital transformation before suffering financially and / or to fall behind their competitors.
By 2021, Forrester predicts that predictive-driven companies will be successful by more than $1 billion a year, by systematically leveraging knowledge across their organization and implementing it across the board to create a customer-oriented competitive advantage.
Companies are transforming their data faster into business value. Yet the many challenges that still remain prevent them from going further. Among them: confidentiality and data security, a low democratization of information within organizations, a lack of training on how to make the most of a growing influx of data, unhelpful solutions, technologies the lack of an analysis strategy and centralized solution for data capture and analysis. As for making analytics a priority for management, 20% of companies surveyed admit to be far from it.
Director of digital strategy, a champion of analysis?
To drive the movement focused on understanding and analyzing information, organizations are building directors of digital strategy. These executives are at the crossroads of computing and economics. Their role is to define and implement the analytical strategy of their company and integrate it into its culture, a mission that certainly requires character.
If, according to Gartner, 90% of companies will have a Chief Data Officer by the end of 2019, the research firm predicts success for only half of them. Indeed, these business information songwriters will have to focus on value creation and revenue generation, tackle spending control, risk mitigation, data misinformation in the organization and, horse chestnut of the corporate world, exceed resistance to change.
Accelerate change
And yet, companies that go further and faster in their analytics initiatives already perceive the commercial value of their data. And the key benefits achieved with their transformation reflect the success of their efforts. To name a few, let’s note a clear improvement in efficiency and productivity, greater financial performance, more efficient decision-making, improved experience, acquisition and retention customers and the increased ability to identify and create new sources of revenue.
A race without a finish line
According to an Innosight study , the average seniority of companies in the S & P 500 index was 37 in 1977. By 2027, it is expected to last only 12 years. At this rate, about half of the companies currently listed in the S & P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years.
The digital transformation has no finishing line, but makes no mistake: there is a race going on to turn data into knowledge and offer new or evolving customer experiences and business models.
So, is your organization in the lead, catching up or falling behind on data?
