Are Businesses in Digital Denial, or Really Transforming?

Most businesses recognize that Digital Transformation is important—but are they taking the right steps in order to avoid falling behind the competition?

Digital transformation is a phrase that seems to be on the tip of a lot of business leaders’ tongues these days. As technology changes the face of virtually all businesses, most of them agree it’s important to transform. However, it can be hard to pin down exactly what’s needed to achieve this—and many organizations appear not to have a plan at all yet.

Are most companies moving in the right direction, or living in digital denial, mistakenly believing they’re on the path to success?

To try to get at the heart of this, we recently undertook a survey of 700 decision makers. This influential survey has prompted many leading commentators to reexamine the state of the industry, and the findings are telling.

While many organizations are facing the reality of the changing digital landscape—there’s a lot of denial out there, too.

Key Findings

• 96% of organizations see digital transformation as important or critical, yet 62% say their organization is in denial about the need to transform digitally
• 86% say they have two years to make inroads before suffering financial or competitive consequences (55% say a year or less); 59% are worried they may already be too late
• 99% say the main driver for digital transformation is optimizing customer experiences and engagement; 61% say customer engagement is a #1 priority for the next 12 months and 50% plan to invest in building applications in the next year
• 72% feel IT is more likely to be the final decision maker/budget holder for digital initiatives; 78% say better alignment of IT and marketing is needed to deliver on digital transformation efforts
• 58% say a high reliance on IT to deliver strategy is a barrier to provide improved customer experience through digital transformation; more than half cite lack of skills and leadership as key barriers

A Way Forward

There are many paths forward in your digital transformation journey. As noted by Joe McKendrick of Forbes, six of the seven major initiatives we highlighted in our survey were in development by less than half of all organizations—the one exception being improving the customer journey/digital touchpoint mapping (57%).

That doesn’t mean you should throw your hands up. The most important thing you can do is start by taking a holistic view of your company to define what digital business means, so that you can truly understand why digital transformation matters to you. Armed with that understanding, it’s far easier to move forward with a sustainable plan that will establish you as an industry leader.

Without doing so, the temptation is to lurch from siloed initiative to siloed initiative, or perhaps worse—to do nothing. These are the choices that lead to loss of market, declining relevance, and eventually even death.

Learn More Today

You can find the full results of our survey with additional insights and analysis here. Don’t have time to read the full report today? Take key insights in at a glance with an infographic based on the survey results.