'Digital Acceleration' - The Mission of Every Organization in 2021

Unlike ever thought, the playing field for businesses has changed faster than expected. It is all digital now. This advancement has resulted in many shifts some of which are positive while few, negative. Though the rush for going digital initially was the need of the hour, it is now more about being into the race and winning it. However, constant scaling of digital acceleration is paramount now. HCL’s new findings on digital technology investment and deployment by enterprises stated in its report Digital Acceleration for Business Resilience also highlights this. According to the report, nearly 89 percent of 420 senior business and IT decision makers across industries are stepping up their digital initiatives.

The respondents stated cybersecurity and cloud as the top two technologies to receive increased investment as a direct result of the pandemic. HCL’s report also reveals three key actions business leaders need to take to realize the benefits of digital acceleration for their organizations and customers. Reprioritization of digital investments and shortening of implementation cycles, inspecting and reworking business architecture for operational agility, and auditing the partner ecosystem to ensure their companies have the right external expertise – are the three major steps every leaders must take into consideration. However, the mantra is uniquely designing and deploying these for individual industries.

Digital acceleration is pushing business leaders to turn their three year roadmap for digital transformation into an iterative implementation that can promote longterm changes to stay competitive and support business and customer needs. Hence decision makers are taking action to stay competitive in the current landscape, which includes right from budgeting for new, adaptable innovations that foster enterprise agility to building strategic partner ecosystems.

Increasing Board'sfocus on Digital Investment
The focus of the board is now on digital transformation. There has been a considerable increase in this number from 42 percent at the start of 2020 to 55 percent currently. However, the industries that started 2020 at the bottom in terms of board-level digital focus have reported the greatest increase throughout the year, closing the gap and representing a leveling of digital investment focus across industries. Nearly 88 percent of the organizations already have a formal digital transformation strategy in place, and 57 percent have a tactical roadmap to follow, making next-generation implementations under digital acceleration vital for resilience.

Not every businesses survived the pandemic. According to the survey, nearly 62 percent of the organizations reported a negatively disrupted supply chain and 90 percent reporting a change in demand (either positive or negative). Hence it is important to build greater flexibility into the business process and technology architecture to respond to uncertain environments now and in the future.

However, large and complex legacy organizations had their own set of challenges to deal with. Their inability to quickly adapt and test business models in an iterative fashion poses a critical challenge to transformation. Hence an increased focus on next-gen technologies such as cybersecurity and cloud are necessary for future-proofingenterprises, especially looking at the spike in cyberattacks and ransomware attacks. Hence nearly 45 percent of HCL’s survey respondents use a partner ecosystem to execute their enterprise digital transformation and 48 percent report external partners as playing a role in defining their digital transformation strategy.

While a lot is discussed about the challenges, the survey highlights the top three barriers to digital transformation, which are data security/governance (40 percent), legacy technology (35 percent) and lack of internal skills (35 percent). Nearly 58 percent of respondents report they have crated new in-house teams to execute digital transformation, while only a slightly smaller proportion (55 percent) are executing within business units. It also reports that 70 percent of organizations with a robust data strategy provide a consistent omnichannel customer experience, compared to 27 percent of organizations with incomplete or nonexistent data strategies.