Published on the 19/10/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Chief digital officers may be all the rage among transforming enterprises – but they could find themselves with a very short corporate shelf life according to new research…
A survey of 444 business executives, 32 percent of whom are based in Asia Pacific, has been conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit at the behest of Accenture and Pegasystems.
The report, which was released last week, notes that while companies which are considered to be leading the pack in terms of their race to digitise businesses often have appointed CDOs, it is often seen as a transitional role. CIOs and CTOs meanwhile play the driving role in 52 percent of businesses.
As digital practices are rolled out across an enterprise the need for a specialist role fades according to the report.
Regardless of who is driving the programme, there’s a long journey ahead. The Digital Evolution report found that just 5 percent of organisations were able to deliver a truly seamless experience for customers regardless of how they interacted with an organisation while 10 percent of respondents claimed to be “fully digital.”
It’s debatable exactly what that “fully digital” means of course – the report itself describes the term as “nebulous”.
The drivers of digital practices were better understood though – being the need for a competitive edge, a tool to boost customer experience and loyalty, to improve efficiency, and allow internally driven disruption.
Today around a third of respondents said that their operations were split equally between digital and traditional operations, indicating that this is still a long journey for most organisations.
Scott Leader Pegasystems ANZ MD said that although only 10 percent of organisations claimed to be fully digital today, 80 percent wanted to be so within five years – with an understanding that to achieve that they would have to work on implementing and leveraging real time information systems.
He acknowledged the difficulties over defining a digital business, but was able easily to define a non-digital business noting that; “The front end experience is important but if it is not seamless to the back end for fulfilment then it’s not really digital.”
The report noted that even among the market leaders just 28 percent of respondents said that they had fully integrated their digital financial processes with the back end. For the laggards the figure was a much lower 10 percent.
