Published on the 30/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
The overwhelming majority of global business leaders (96 percent) recognise that digital technology has forever changed the rules – only some are ready for the challenge however…
A survey of over 3600 business leaders from 18 countries around the world (including over 200 Australian respondents but none from New Zealand) has examined their opinions regarding the technologies that will have greatest impact on businesses over the next five years, and also organisational preparedness for the looming changes. The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of EMC.
Perhaps unsurprisingly access to mobile devices was identified as having the greatest impact, followed by data analytics, cloud computing, social media and the internet of things.
In terms of how technology should be applied in enterprises survey respondents noted that in order of importance it was to: predictively spot new opportunities, demonstrate transparency and trust, innovate in an agile way, deliver a unique and personalised experience, and ensure that the business was “always on and real time”.
However, on average, fewer than one in eight organisations felt they were currently able to do any of those well.
Meanwhile, a survey of 400 CEOs of large global enterprises released by Gartner last week noted that customer facing and analytics capabilities would be of greatest importance over the next five years, with customer engagement management, digital marketing and business analytics deemed key.
Australian organisations participating in the EMC survey revealed a certain amount of chutzpah. The nation topped the global rankings, with 35 percent of local respondents claiming that Australians could use technology to predictively spot new opportunities even though just 27 percent of them said they can innovate extremely well in an agile manner.
The survey also referenced Gartner and IDC data which predicts that by 2020 more than seven billion people on at least 30 billion devices will have created 44 zettabytes of data (or 44 trillion gigabytes).
The challenge for many organisations is to leverage that data.
While 49 percent of respondents understood that they could get more value out of data, many don’t know how – only 30 percent said that they were able to act on information in real time.
A highly confident 82 percent of Australian respondents said that their ability to take and apply data was good or very good (higher than the Asia Pacific average of 70 percent) but only 59 percent believe that decision making would be improved by better data.
The full report can be viewed here.
