Published on the 20/01/2016 | Written by Beverley Head

Australian corporate board members and senior executives should hold their nerve in spite of the rocky start to 2016 and focus on continued digitization of their businesses…

Jane Livesey, Accenture’s ANZ group technology lead, said that when there is market volatility executives tend to focus on driving cost from the business. But she said that it was important enterprise Australia held its nerve with regard to developing and implementing new digital strategies in order to ensure it caught up with international peers.

The challenging financial conditions could in fact prove an ally, as Livesey said that after the GFC impacted the US and Europe, there was evidence that companies had sought out new ways of operating. In Australia which was cushioned from the full impact of the GFC courtesy of the then resources boom, there had been less impetus for change.

Now however that could change. “Now is the time to accelerate …and evolve the business to respond to market changes. A year ago we were talking about ‘are you a disruptor or being disrupted?’ Now there is a complete acknowledgement that business is changing.”

She said that there was also growing evidence that some organisations were now moving from simple experimentation with digital products and services to a more wholesale adoption of digital approaches.

But she acknowledged that there was still some smoke and mirrors being used.

“There are customers getting orders generated online which are then emailed and rekeyed at the back end,” she said, because the back end legacy had not been updated to handle a more digital approach. “Now the legacy programmes are required to catch up.”

Livesey said that CIOs were still grappling with the challenge of managing legacy platforms while developing new digital applications. It’s what Gartner describes as bi-modal IT.

The challenge however isn’t purely technology or budget based – there is a huge cultural barrier in some organisations where there has traditionally been a more measured waterfall approach to systems development. “They are really grappling with how to manage the culture and be more flexible and acknowledge risk,” she said.

The organisations which were most advanced where those which had a “better grasp of their digital strategy and it is embedded in their end to end strategy,” and where the board had a stronger understanding of both technology and the need to accept a modicum of risk. Also organisations were starting to think about a broader business ecosystem where technology could be used to underpin broader business relationships and new ways of operating.