Emerging digital technologies represent both an opportunity and the threat of disruption to South African organisations. Based on recent research by Accenture in partnership with ITWeb, South African companies are investing heavily in digital and are starting to achieve results.
"From the survey results and Accenture's analysis, there is a strong correlation between an increase in the pace of technology adoption and a focus on investments in digital. In fact, 86% of companies indicated an increase in the pace of technology adoption, while 83% are focusing their efforts on digital," says Lee Naik, chief digital officer of Accenture in SA.
He was commenting on the results of the ITWeb/Accenture 2015 ICT survey, which ran online from 26 January to 15 February.
"This finding is further reinforced when one considers last year only half of organisations had adopted or were in the process of adopting digital technologies."
He believes this finding shows organisations have received tangible results from digital investments within the past 12 months.
Naik adds: "The reason for this is clear, as digital projects have a much shorter development lifecycle than traditional technologies, and it would appear we are starting to see South African companies benefit from this phenomenon."
According to Naik, digital adoption is no longer a choice if organisations want to keep up with technology advancements.
"It would appear a large portion of South African companies have realised digital provides an opportunity to leapfrog the typical bottlenecks of legacy and infrastructure dependencies, and are implementing projects at an unprecedented pace."
It's a digital question
The majority of respondents (86%) indicated their organisation had established a formal digital strategy, actively executing on this strategy by assessing the potential of digital technologies, and 67% have moved past the assessment phase and are investing in digital technologies.
When asked how important it is for a company to implement a digital strategy, Naik explains that traditionally, technology activities have focused on gathering and analysing business requirements, and then the IT organisation focused its attention on delivering technology solutions that support the business strategy.
Naik comments further: "Over the last few years, however, we have seen digital has become an ever-increasing imperative in the minds of business executives as digital solutions have started to fundamentally disrupt the way businesses operate. Thus, the question has changed from 'how can technology support my business' to 'how can digital help me avoid disruption and how can I disrupt the competition'."
New era of IOT
According to the survey, 64% of survey respondents said their organisation had some form of Internet of things (IOT) presence. While some progress has been made, 21% of respondents stated they were in the process of investigating existing data sources for the acquisition of data, and only 27% are actually using this data to make decisions and interact with customers.
"IOT is becoming a force that is driving new innovation and new opportunities by bringing every object, consumer and activity into the digital realm. Businesses and customers are finding themselves connected to a digital fabric which transcends the single thread between business and customer, and extends this across a network of businesses and suppliers and also other customers from around the world. This network of connections introduces a new era of the 'digital ecosystem' which is already transforming the way in which businesses and customers operate today."
He says the key to truly achieving success within this digital ecosystem is rooted in the organisation's ability to gain control of the customer's point of access and create a highly personalised experience that engages and exhilarates the customer.
It would appear a large portion of respondents agree with this position, as it also emerged from the survey that personalised customer experience is a top priority for a large portion of the respondents (45%), and came within the top three for organisations for a further 18%.
"Over the last few decades, the Internet has moved from providing static content to providing high levels of personalisation in various aspects of our daily lives. This ability to create things like 'my news feed', 'my playlist', 'my book recommendations', 'my new car', etc, are all examples of how the Internet has been able to provide personalisation on a massive scale."
Naik explains that now every experience is becoming a digital experience as ordinary "things" become intelligent devices.
"Today, there are digital parking meters, smart refrigerators, adaptive security systems, and much more. These digital devices enable personalised experiences: there are smart lights that can react to environmental factors to provide individual user experiences."
It would appear that while local organisations have digital as a top priority, the lack of skills to implement new technologies is a serious impediment. When asked how challenging it is for organisations to fill technology-related roles, the outcome of the survey was not surprising: 32% stated it was very challenging, 33% said moderately challenging, and only 12% stated it was not challenging at all.
"As digital technologies advance and devices become 'smarter', organisations will need to rethink their workforce. It will become increasingly important that business leaders become highly tuned to digital opportunities and threats, while the IT organisation will need to get better at rapidly leveraging cloud- and platform-based solutions to respond to an ever-increasing pace of business change," Naik concludes.