CA Southern Africa has revealed the results of a CA Technologies global study on the role of software as a business enabler, finding that in today’s application economy, it’s clear that digital transformation has reached every aspect of business. Simply put, exploiting modern technology and communications to transform one or more key aspects of a business to achieve a state of digital readiness has now become a mainstream activity to drive ROI.
In the application economy businesses are moving at the speed of light to leapfrog competition and accelerate the digital transformation of the organisation. The study, Exploiting the Software Advantage: Lessons from Digital Disrupters, found that Digital Transformation is being driven as a coordinated strategy across a majority of organisations (55 percent), with many projects underway in multiple areas of the company, including customer services, sales and marketing, and product/service development. As a result, 45 percent of respondents have already seen measurable increases in customer retention and acquisition from digital transformation initiatives and 44 percent have seen an overall increase in revenue.
The results also spurred the development of the Digital Effectiveness Index (DEI), a measurement tool developed in partnership with Freeform Dynamics. Using this measure, a group of top-performing organisations has emerged – the Digital Disrupters, identified as the top 14 percent of respondents.
“Not all businesses are on equal footing– some are forging ahead, some are getting left behind,” said Otto Berkes, CTO at CA Technologies, “In fact, there are some wide differences in overall effectiveness and maturity of digital initiatives—from significant revenue growth and customer retention to ultimately profits impacting the bottom line.”
In this elite group of Digital Disrupters, or those well on their way, respondents are already seeing impressive business benefits of embarking on a digital transition These include:
- Increased Revenue: Digital Disrupters have two times higher revenue growth than mainstream organisations.
- Higher Profits:Two and a half times higher profit growth than the mainstream organizations is reported.
Additional key findings of the DEI include:
- Countries like the U.S., Canada, Germany and France lead the others.
- Within verticals we see the strongest showing from Telecom and Financial Services, firms with public sector and consumer packaged goods lagging.
“While there are already successful companies who have become Digital Disrupters, mainstream businesses simply cannot continue with the status quo— they must undergo significant change to fully integrate digital into all aspects of their business,” said Berkes.
However, the good news for these businesses is that there is a clear set of common traits and behaviours among today’s Digital Disrupters. The study, which surveyed 1,442 respondents from 16 countries across nine industry sectors, found that Digital Disrupters are:
- Software-driven:Digital Disrupters were 3.5x more likely (than the mainstream) to recognize the importance of being a software-driven business (60% vs 17%)
- Advocates for Agile:Disrupters were 2.5x more likely to fully use agile development (77% vs 31%), and in addition- 2.5x more likely to have DevOps broadly in place (70% vs 28%)
- Open to APIs:The study found that leaders were 2x more likely to leverage APIs for internal development (68% vs 34%), and 2.8x more likely to use APIs to enable third party apps (66% vs 24%).
Survey Methodology
The global online survey of 1,442 senior IT and business executives was sponsored by CA Technologies and conducted by industry analyst firm Freeform Dynamics in July 2015. It was augmented by in-depth telephone interviews with key industry executives. For full survey methodology details, see the report “Exploiting the Software Advantage: Lessons from Digital Disrupters”.
