South African companies do not compare well to the rest of the world with regards to technology adoption.
So says Lee Naik, MD for IT strategy at Accenture SA, commenting on some of the findings of the Accenture Technology Vision 2014.
Accenture also conducted a survey in the local market to understand the level of adoption of key technology trends as a leading indicator of digital business success - and the results were quite surprising, says Naik.
According to the study, only a third of companies are executing a cloud strategy, and only 13% have implemented bring your own device programme. Some 81% of companies are highly dissatisfied with their ability to source and action data rapidly; however, only 16% have implemented strategies to address this, Naik explains.
Furthermore, Naik notes that adoption of these digital trends will expose business to a highly risky cyber crime environment, yet only 55% of companies have a security plan at all and only 15% believe that the plan they have is comprehensive.
"If Accenture's prediction of 'future businesses will either be disruptive or be disrupted' comes to pass, this obviously paints a very alarming picture for South African companies," he says.
He believes that in a globally competitive market place, South African companies will be put under increasing pressure to enter into the digital marketplace, as traditional revenue streams are becoming eroded through disruptive technologies.
A good example of this is the pressure placed on the local ADSL network during what some industry analysts are calling 'Netflix Hour,' Naik points out, adding that online streaming is starting to become much more prevalent, as local consumers start to make use of these services at the expense of pay TV networks in much the same way that pay TV on-demand services have been highly detrimental to the DVD store business model.
Also, given the pace of technology advancement, the strategy of being a fast follower becomes a very poor one, where the late entrant to the market is, in the majority of cases, unable to catch up to the organisations that pioneered and created the market in the first place, he says.
"In South Africa, we have observed that enterprises have focused their investments on the low hanging fruit of cloud-based storage and infrastructure and much less in software-as-a-service and business process-as-a-service, which have a much better intrinsic business case but present a much greater risk to the organisation."
What is interesting however, are the investments that are planned in the analytics arena, as more and more CIOs and business leaders recognise the need to extract real-time and actionable insight from the wealth of data that is constantly generated by business operations, he explains.
"Also, enterprises are starting to establish more robust mobility capabilities and in much the same way that a business Web site is considered a must - having a mobile presence is becoming a business necessity," concludes Naik.
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