According to a survey held by Gartner, there is an increasing gap between businesses which have already taken digital initiatives and those which are still under the planning stage. While the gap continues to widen, the survey shows that digital business leaders are way ahead of the pack. The survey found that 32 percent of leaders at organizations with USD 250 million or more in annual revenue said they have a business that is a digital business, up from 22 percent in the same survey last year.
“The survey results underlined how digital business leaders are more likely than others to focus on design and the creation of new digital business moments. We asked respondents to rank the importance of five success factors, breaking down the results according to whether companies were using digital marketing techniques (a precursor to digital business), were planning digital business or had already implemented digital business. Not surprisingly, the last group accorded more importance to design and moments, which are necessary to execute digital business,” said Jorge Lopez, VP & analyst at Gartner.
Digital business moments are catalysts that set in motion a series of events and actions involving a network of people, businesses and things that spans or crosses multiple industries and multiple ecosystems.
“Digital business moments of untapped opportunity and competition can rapidly change the dynamics across industries. As such, the successful design and development of business moments, which the company can replicate, are the most significant undertaking an organization working to become a digital business can take. Innovative companies are tailoring digital business moments to complement their existing products and services,” shared Patrick Meehan, Research VP at Gartner.
The survey also revealed that most companies undertaking digital business initiatives don’t make a distinction between digital business strategy and business strategy — to this group, they are the same or integrated with the main business strategy. Those in the planning phase see the two as separate. I
Other survey results show that executives already in digital business are invested in piloting and deploying, while those at companies in the planning phase are focusing on investigation and experimentation. The top priority for digital business front-runners:
Adopting new technology (70 percent)
Creating a highly collaborative environment (56 percent)
Supporting customer-driven technology change (53 percent)
When asked to identify what would be the impact of digital business — either positive or negative — over the next five years, organizational leaders overwhelmingly concurred on the upside, anticipating improvements in customer experience and engagement (86 percent), IT organization (86 percent), workforce productivity (84 percent) and sales organization (83 percent).
“The disruptive effects of digital business cannot be underestimated. To date, a limited number of product categories — music, books, photographs and newspapers — have seen their business models upended. Going forward, organizational leaders in other product and service categories will also need to adapt by restructuring the workforce, eliminating obsolete roles, and finding talent that can help design systems and workflows that optimize the use of things integrated with people and business to drive new value for customers,” commented Mr. Lopez.
