Published on the 30/11/2017 | Written by Newsdesk

Less than 10 percent of enterprises have achieved their digital transformation goals…

Market watcher Ovum reckons that across 14 industries, the telecoms and banking sectors are most mature in the drive for digital transformation. But even so, the researcher said these industries score somewhat dismally on a ‘digital maturity index’ created by Ovum itself for the purposes of making the measurement.

Ovum said it’s ICT Enterprise Insights program is based on primary interviews with more than 6,300 enterprises globally, asking senior ICT executives to rate their organisations against nine steps identified as key to digital transformation.

These ranged from tackling cybersecurity, to developing digital skills, creating the necessary organisational structure and culture, to digitising processes, creating digital services, and having a clearly articulated digital strategy.

In a statement, Ovum said it created the digital maturity index to aggregate progress by enterprises in each vertical across the nine steps.

While the telecoms sector was most advanced, the overall level of digital maturity is low, with its index score currently at 43.9 percent, with banking next at 42 percent; many providers in both sectors are still at early stages or mid-stream levels across most of steps. Indeed, across the 6,300+ enterprises surveyed, only 8 percent consider themselves to have achieved transformation, and only a fraction over 16 percent believe they are well-advanced. Almost as many (23 percent) rate themselves to be still at the early stages.

If you’re wondering if or why digital transformation is even necessary, consider the case of the New Zealand Racing Board (NZRB). An organisation with a long history, recent times have seen its competition explode and the very nature of what it does – ‘gaming [that is, gambling, although they don’t like to call it that in the business]’ – change. Its digital transformation has involved an at-scale shift into the cloud, getting rid of its own data centre, the introduction of cloud ERP thanks to Australian vendor Technology One, and even a shift from Microsoft to Google for its productivity applications.

“If we hadn’t done that, we’d be facing a slow, painful death. [This exercise] is fundamental to the long term survival of the organisation,” Steve Burgess, NZRB ‎Head of Accounting Operations told iStart.

Burt back to Ovum. It said its ICT Enterprise Insights program examined the role of enabling digital technologies in path to digital transformation, including Big Data, blockchain, IoT, platform architecture/APIs, artificial intelligence (AI), and microservices.

Here, enterprises are most advanced in adoption of Big Data and API-based architectures with close to 40 percent actively trialling or deploying these areas, with just under a further 50 percent planning or considering doing so. Microservices and IoT are less currently advanced in terms of active deployment, but over 50 percent planning or considering doing so. In contrast, while AI and blockchain are much discussed, actual traction for digital transformation is much less developed.

Ovum has a digital transformation infographic which presents some of the results of the recent survey.  More on the Ovum ICT Enterprise Insights here.