The route to digital business leadership
The route to digital business leadership
Digital transformation is a continuous process, a journey measured in years. Those that have been successful, the Digital Leaders, do a few things better than everyone else. KPMG professionals also know that this is hard work since only one out of five organizations is currently qualified as a digital leader. The CIOs that step up to embrace the role of change agent and proactively work with their C-suite counterparts and other business leaders to drive their digital transformations put their organizations in a better position to succeed.
We are delighted to share new thought leadership from KPMG’s global Technology Center of Excellence – The route to digital business leadership – a follow-up on the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey.
Key takeaways:
- The 2017 Harvey Nash / KPMG CIO survey reveals that 18% of responding organizations are digital leaders.
- Digital leaders are 4x more likely to be very effective at fostering innovation than others.
- Digital leaders are very effective at aligning business and IT strategy at 2x the rate of others.
- Digital leaders are adept at integrating core business systems with newer digital technologies.
- Digital leaders aggressively invest in disruptive technologies.
- Digital leaders are very effective at selecting the most appropriate technologies and architectures.
In this year’s Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, we recognized that there was a group of respondents (18%, less than one in five) who are ‘very effective’ at using digital technologies to advance their business strategy. We have labelled these organizations ‘Digital Leaders’.
“Digital disruption is changing the world in which we live and work. New technologies have created new markets that, in turn, create new competitors. And those competitors are driving new expectations. To succeed in the digital world, businesses must not only provide superior experiences for consumers, customers, employees and citizens, but deliver on their promises in a faster, more nimble way,” says Richard Perrin, Partner, Head of Advisory at KPMG in Romania.
Based on extensive analysis of the survey data, KPMG member firms’ professional experience and conversations with clients, we have identified four key practices that set these ‘digital leaders’ apart from other organizations.
The report describes each in more detail:
- Build on a stable and secure infrastructure - The infrastructure and applications must be architected for resiliency so that they can automatically detect failures and react accordingly.
- Invest aggressively in agile and disruptive technologies - Digital leaders are aggressively investing in agile and disruptive technologies including agile methodologies, cloud, digital labor, and artificial intelligence (AI).
- Be adept at aligning business and IT strategy - It is very important for organizations to ensure that IT and business strategy are tightly aligned, because a business strategy that is not intrinsically linked to technology will lead to failure.
- Be focused on innovation and growth - Digital leaders are more focused on innovation and growth than other organizations. Innovation is driving new business and operating models; digitizing core business processes; and creating new, incremental revenue streams.
Digital leaders are not limited to start-up companies only, even though these organizations have the advantage of not being burdened with legacy systems and entrenched cultures. It is well known that established companies have higher brand awareness, an existing customer base and often more abundant resources to underpin their digital transformations.
“The exponential nature of the change that we are facing calls for a quick understanding of the main drivers of change as well as a fast alignment to this new reality. The digitalization of an existing business is not a mundane process. It requires the use of the newest technologies to drive the dematerialization of both the business and the delivery models. Not all companies that start this journey get it right from the start and some of them lose important opportunities along the way. The others become the Digital Leaders of these new ecosystems” says Ciprian Negura, Senior Manager, Management Consulting in KPMG Romania.
But how do you become a digital leader? We set out six steps that organizations can undertake to help close the gaps, and move themselves down the road towards digital business leadership.
1. Educate/evangelize the C-suite.
2. Re-architect for openness and agility.
3. Nurture an ecosystem of capabilities.
4. Promote business technology self-sufficiency.
5. Pay down technical debt.
6. Embed culture change programs throughout.
The full report can be downloaded here.
About the Survey
The 2017 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey is the largest IT leadership survey in the world in terms of number of respondents. The survey of 4,498 CIOs and technology leaders was conducted between December 19, 2016 and April 3, 2017, across 86 countries.
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