While many organizations are focused on IT cost reduction, productivity gain and process improvement, the latest global research from Accenture reveals 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 information technology (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 recognized 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 “mobilizing” their businesses. According to the research, 69% of them are committed to mobile transactions compared to 42% of other organizations, which allows their customers to reorder their favorite 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 virtualized, dynamically provisioned hybrid infrastructure.
The survey also found that companies expect to operate in a hybrid IT environment for the foreseeable future. The top performers predict that a substantial part of their IT footprint – whether infrastructure, middleware or applications – will remain “traditional,” both hosted and on-premise. In fact, these leaders believe that they will still maintain nearly six in 10 of their applications (59 percent) in a traditional license model by 2020.