While many organisations are focused on IT cost reduction, productivity gain and process improvement, the latest global research from Accenture has revealed that companies that invest in digital technologies and improving customer experiences are able to identify new growth opportunities and enhance performance.
The research report, ‘High Performers in IT: Defined by Digital’, features insights from senior IT executives in more than 200 global companies across a range of industries. The report shows that high performers devote 55% of their IT budgets to delivering strategic capabilities that support growth and business performance.
Their counterparts, however, invest only 37%. Moreover, five times more businesses that excel in their use of IT, look beyond a narrow IT lens to consider broader business implications – social, economic and geopolitical factors – as part of their strategy and planning.
Accenture’s research found that the adoption rate of key technologies, including cloud computing, analytics, social, mobility and security, was greater across-the-board for companies that excel in their use of IT than their counterparts. According to the research, these companies have recognised and embraced the transformational impact of digital IT to create new products and services that supports growth.
For example, the high performers are leading the way in "mobilising" their businesses. According to the research, 69% of them are committed to mobile transactions compared to 42% of other organisations, which allows their customers to reorder their favourite pair of shoes, book travel, pay for their coffee and even transfer cash between bank accounts on the go. And approximately twice as many IT leaders than non-leaders are achieving or exceeding expected business value from their investments in predictive and descriptive analytics.
"High performers are building a strong foundation for their digital business by harnessing technology advances across all parts of their operations to help improve customer experiences and make a more significant contribution to the company’s business performance," said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer, Accenture.
"Companies that lead in the use IT understand how new digital capabilities can be applied and set their sights beyond operational effectiveness and IT productivity, and invest more in technologies to drive future growth."
According to the findings, the leaders in IT are also moving to the cloud faster and reaping more benefits sooner than other organizations. One-third of the executives representing those companies responded that they are effectively replacing legacy components with private and public cloud alternatives while almost one in six already centrally manage a fully virtualised, dynamically provisioned hybrid infrastructure.
Leaders in IT consistently chose customer-focused business objectives among the top three priorities that guide their IT investment strategies. This includes providing the right information to the right person at the right time, finding better ways to interact with customers and delivering new services and products to customers. They also rated front-office applications among their best-performing in terms of technical and business adequacy, which was significantly higher for their companies than for other organisations.
