As business growth becomes harder to achieve in the face of tough economic times, global CEOs are shifting their priorities to embrace digital business.
This is according to research and consulting firm Gartner's 2018 CEO Survey.
The study found CEOs globally are concentrating on transforming the structure of their organisations to include a deeper understanding of digital business.
The survey, which comprises input from 460 CEOs and senior executives across the globe, including SA, examined the perspectives of the CEO in 2018, business issues as well as some areas of technology.
Around 44% of surveyed CEOs said business growth tops their list of priorities this year, followed by corporate structural development (33%) and IT (31%).
However, as simple, implemental growth becomes more difficult to achieve, CEOs are concentrating on changing and upgrading the structure of their companies to intensify their digital transformation initiatives, according to the survey.
"Although growth remains the CEO's biggest priority, there was a significant fall in simple mentions of it this year, from 58% in 2017 to just 40% in 2018. This does not mean CEOs are less focused on growth; instead it shows they are shifting perspective on how to obtain it," says Mark Raskino, vice-president and Gartner fellow.
"The 'corporate' category, which includes actions such as new strategy, corporate partnerships, and mergers and acquisitions, has risen significantly to become the second-biggest priority."
In the background, CEOs' use of the word "digital" has been steadily rising. When asked to describe their top five business priorities, the number of respondents mentioning the word digital at least once has risen from 2.1% in the 2012 survey to 13.4% in 2018, notes Gartner.
"This positive attitude toward digital business is backed up by CEOs' continuing intent to invest in IT. 61% of respondents intend to increase spending on IT in 2018, while 32% plan to make no changes to spending and only 7% foresee spending cuts," notes the survey.
Furthermore, respondents were asked whether they have a management initiative or transformation programme to make their business more digital. The majority (62%) said they did. Of those organisations, 54% said their digital business objective is transformational, while 46% said optimisation is the objective of the initiative.
Jurgen de Jongh, head of pre-sales, Enterprise Services Group at Ricoh SA, says CEOs' top concerns include losing competitive advantage as a result of losing out to the pace of technology innovation.
"CEOs are concerned they may lose competitive-edge due to inefficiencies, that they are at risk of poor governance, they are not agile enough to deal with current and future market changes, and they do not have their fingers on the pulse of their operational data to support e-discovery initiatives," notes De Jongh.
According to a survey conducted by BT in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit, which interviewed around 400 global CEOs, nearly 40% of CEOs said they currently have digital transformation at the very top of their boardroom agenda. Almost a quarter said they are personally leading their company's transformation programmes.
Bas Burger, CEO of Global Services at BT, says: "Our most recent research confirms that digital transformation has become a prevalent topic on the boardroom agenda. It also shows CEOs all around the world identify the skills shortages, lack of insight into what customers and employees really want or need, and security as the main obstacles to delivering an optimal digital experience."
Similarly, PwC's Africa Business Agenda report shows that over half of African CEOs (53%) are exploring the benefits of humans and machines working together in the workplace.
"Technology has brought about a number of advancements in efficiency and the ease of doing business in Africa. No less than 91% of African respondents (global: 90%) believe technology has changed competition in their industry in the past five years," notes PwC.
Share