If you look back at just the past five years, chances are high that new digital technologies have changed the way you live, work and play. New innovations have changed the way you bank, communicate via our devices, and even how much time you might be spending in physical stores. The fact that the digital transformation is gaining ground is no surprise with the most disrupted industries today being media, telecom, consumer financial services, retail and technology.
According to CA Technologies’ new survey - Keeping Score: Why Digital Transformation Matters which details the significant impact digital transformation is having on enterprises in Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ), there is a strong connection between business performance and the technologies and practices that underpin digital transformation.
Across the Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) region, the telecom and public sectors in the region are thriving the most in terms of digital transformation.
The survey introduced the Digital Transformation Business Impact Scorecard (BIS), which assessed the success of enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives. As per the study, overall, impact driven from digital initiatives from the APJ region was higher than the global BIS average of 53, with a score of 56. What this reflects is the enterprises' high confidence in their ability to transform digitally.
Here are the top five key areas in which digital transformation is paying off:
1. Attaining Better Customer Focus
An omni-channel user experience is a must whether it is in-person at a bank branch or retail outlet, over the phone to a call center, or via a mobile app being consumed on the go. If this is handled well, customers will directly and indirectly share huge insights into their preferences and purchasing habits. If this is miscalculated, rate of the customer attrition can be rapid, with little chance to win that disaffected audience back.
As per the survey findings, 73 percent respondents from APJ, reported improvement in customer experience after undergoing digital transformation. There was also 40 percent improvement in customer satisfaction.
2. Improving Business Agility
With mounting pressures to respond to competitive, global market pressures, enterprises that can pivot through technology disruption will remain standing. Digital transformation has improved business agility on a global scale. Organizations in the region are surely seeing marked improvements with 32 percent increase in time-to-decision and 25 percent increase in speed-to-market.
3. Achieving Business Growth
Leveraging modern technology and communications to transform one or more key aspects of the business to achieve a state of digital readiness has now become a mainstream activity to drive ROI. Digital disrupters in APJ are twice more profitable than mainstream organizations. India and China rank highest globally for digital effectiveness, where organizations have seen the most benefit and impact from digital initiatives.
As per the latest findings of the study, respondents in APJ noted 38 percent growth in new business revenue. In fact, the deepening adoption of practices such as agile management, DevOps, API management and identity-centric security has boosted business impact by up to 54 percent in APJ.
4. Gaining a Competitive Advantage
In the application economy, both speed and quality are critical. Quickly delivering customer-winning applications to market can translate to a real competitive advantage. DevOps (the development and operations teams) best practices, such as Continuous Delivery and Agile Operations, can be used to capitalize on opportunities and create competitive differentiation in the application economy.
Having engaged digital transformation, 76 percent reported improvement in digital reach thus gaining a competitive edge.
5. Accomplishing Operational Efficiency
By digitally transforming, enterprises can improve their operational efficiencies through technologies such as automation that helps them keep pace with their dynamic cloud and virtualization environments that are the backbone of the application economy. Other benefits include reduction in IT-related costs, employee productivity as well as mitigating risks.
Besides these five, some of the other benefits include time-to-act on new opportunities, digital reach, customer retention, employee recruitment and retention, quality of development processes/apps and leveraging of third-party developer innovation.
With mobile application becoming preferred interface to the business, CIOs and CTOs need to transform their businesses into thriving, proactive ‘software factories’. Software factories that thrive on an agile and efficient software development process that is constantly translating customer need into delivered experience.
Today, to meet the ever-growing demands of the digital era, it is pertinent for enterprises
to incorporate technology – specifically software, into their operations and embrace digital transformation. It is key for businesses to develop ideas with customers iteratively in order to deliver a rich customer experience throughout the digital journey.
Stephen Miles is chief technology officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies