The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that organizations need to be agile, robust, and secure. They need to seamlessly engage customers and employees in both physical and digital domains. As many—if not most— organizations fall short of this ideal, the current pandemic has been challenging—even painful—as industries and enterprises react and adapt.
Challenges also present opportunities. Recognizing the necessity and opportunity to transform, 60% of executives surveyed globally by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) indicated that they are using this time to dramatically accelerate their company’s digital transformation. In India, commitment to digital transformation is even greater—69%.
40% of business in India use hybrid cloud for agile development and delivery, compared to 65% of top performers.
How technology is making the difference
Digital transformation is really all about leveraging technologies to re-invent and improve your business. Technology is often the key determinant of organizational survival and success. So to what extent does this maxim remain true during the pandemic? And which technologies make a difference between the highest performing businesses and others during the pandemic?
We used our extensive research data combined with the latest financial performance (H1 2020) to develop a new ground-breaking approach and answer the following questions:
- Are some industries more sensitive to technology adoption than others?
- Are there some key technologies that provide greater impact on performance? Do different technologies play different roles in different industries?
- How has the mix of differentiating technologies in each industry changed during this time of crisis?
- Does the impact of this technology mix vary by key business capabilities? What are the combinations that optimize performance returns?
Technologies critical to performance have changed drastically during the pandemic.
Here are a some of the key take-aways from our analysis across 18 industries that also hold true in India:
- Technology adoption has become a far more important performance differentiator during the COVID-19 disruption. Tech-savvy organizations outperformed their peers by 6 percentage points on average across the 12 industries where technology acted as a performance differentiator.
- The “technology mix” recipe for success is changing. Increasingly, cloud and AI are becoming performance differentiators.
- Each industry has a unique “fingerprint.” Technologies that benefit one industry are not always differentiating for another.
Explore the full report to learn which combination of technologies is making the biggest impact on revenues in your industry.
Meet the authors
Anthony Marshall, Senior Research Director, Thought Leadership, IBM Institute for Business ValueRishi Aurora, Business Transformation Services Growth Platform Leader, IBM India South Asia
Jean-Stéphane Payraudeau, Managing Partner, Offering Management, Assets, IBV, and Industry CoCs IBM Consulting
Jacob Dencik, Ph.D, Chief Economist and Global Sustainability Research Leader, IBM Institute for Business Value
Originally published 27 August 2021