Leaders in Digital Transformation Have These Traits in Common
What characteristics do leaders in digital transformation have in common? A new study by open-source provider Alfresco Software and Forbes Insights aims to find out what separates the winners from the losers in the digital economy.
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Thirty-nine percent of organizations have shown leadership in design thinking, defined as a human centered approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for business success. Design thinking fosters an iterative approach in which collaboration with the customer or user leads to a superior brand experience, one that has optimized the customer experience (CX) and the user experience (UX) in their end-to-end journeys throughout the value chain.
Leaders in Design Thinking closely embrace CX and UX as key to their success, and have committed resources to enable this. In addition, digital leaders will continue pouring more resources into their CX and UX, as well as partner experiences. Close to 90 percent of leaders say they expect to increase their investments and resources significantly in this direction over the next three years, close to three times the level of their less digitally advanced counterparts.
Close to two-thirds of Best-in-Class organizations are seeing a strong impact through traditional research methods, such as surveys and focus groups, which help them better understand how customers are interacting and prefer to interact with their applications and services. In contrast, fewer of their developing counterparts (37 percent) and only a small handful of lagging organizations (8 percent) benefit from such research.
UX is a core commitment seen among Best-in-Class organizations: Sixty-eight percent of executives in this group say user surveys and focus groups are having a strong impact on helping them develop more responsive interfaces and processes; only a handful of their less-developed counterparts are getting anything out of such user research.
The second component of success in today’s digital economy is the ability to employ new technologies and recharged processes to open the gates of innovation. To that end, 20% of organizations are leading the way in open thinking, defined as ensuring access for employees, partners, suppliers and customers to content and data within an open, well-architected platform. Open thinking creates a multiplier effect that leads to an environment that is continually growing and expanding, and enables platforms and networks to flourish.
Best-in-Class enterprises are six times more likely than laggards to foresee significant increases in the flow of ideas through their organizations in the digital race. Seventy-four percent indicate that they expect a great deal more innovation from outside parties, and from employees not in traditional innovation roles such as R&D or product development. By contrast, 41% of their developing counterparts expect such a significant burst of ideas from the outside, along with only 12% of lagging enterprises.
Best-in-Class enterprises are much more welcoming to customers’ ideas than their less advanced counterparts, the survey shows. More than seven in 10 of the Best-in-Class enterprises in this survey strongly agree that their customers have easy access to their internal systems, and six in 10 agree that there are few or blurred boundaries between themselves and their customers, especially when it comes to exchanging information.
Likewise, there is a similar pattern seen for partners and vendors. More than six in 10 executives with Best-in-Class enterprises state they have easy access to their partners’ or vendors’ systems, compared with only 37 percent of developing organizations and 8 percent of laggards.
For the vast majority of executives with Best-in-Class organizations, open-source technologies are seen as the best way to achieve such openness. More than nine in 10 executives with organizations leading the way in digital thinking report that open-source platforms or frameworks are “extremely important” to keeping the movement of ideas and concepts flowing inside and outside of their organizations. Another seven in 10 of Best-in-Class organizations place high value on web-based and cloud-based services to deliver innovation.
Another 31 percent of organizations are top performers in platform thinking, defined as enabling both external and internal stakeholders to more easily do business with the organization, opening up digital resources to all stakeholders. A platform is a plug-and-play business model that allows multiple participants (producers and consumers) to connect in a shared environment, interact with one another, and create and exchange value. It involves building out services and processes to offer key functions and data sets that are accessible at any time to participants across an ecosystem.
Best-in-Class enterprises lead the way in platform thinking, opening their systems and applications to their community of users or developers, while also consuming a sizable share of services provided by third parties. Close to three-fourths of executives in Best-in-Class enterprises say their provisioning of services to outside parties will increase significantly over the next three years. These capabilities may be extended to external parties through APIs, cloud services, self-service portals, open data or other means.
Best-in-Class enterprises are more likely to see their systems and processes as being more agile and adaptable than their less-developed counterparts, the survey finds. The majority of these leading companies, 66%, strongly agree that their platforms enable them to make quick changes as customer demands change. In addition, two-thirds of Best-in-Class also agree that they can quickly launch new products and services, often without their IT departments needing to get involved.
Best-in-Class enterprises are more likely to see their systems and processes as being more agile and adaptable than their less-developed counterparts, the survey finds. The majority of these leading companies, 66%, strongly agree that their platforms enable them to make quick changes as customer demands change. In addition, two-thirds of Best-in-Class also agree that they can quickly launch new products and services, often without their IT departments needing to get involved.
What characteristics do leaders in digital transformation have in common? A new study by open-source provider Alfresco Software and Forbes Insights aims to find out what separates the winners from the losers in the digital economy. “The Great Rethink: How Digital Leaders Are Building Tomorrow’s Organizations” mined interviews of more than 300 executives to find out what enables some organizations to become digital disruptors while others lag behind.
“Today’s corporate leaders must realize that they need to disrupt or risk being disrupted. Those who are not yet thinking about how they will innovate with new approaches leveraging technology are at risk,” Alfresco founder and CTO John Newton warned.
In the end, it all comes down to the efficient movement of information through business processes, connecting customers, employees and suppliers across departmental and operational boundaries quickly, securely and intelligently. The study shows three distinct areas that leaders should focus on to get the right information to the right people at the right time: design thinking, open thinking and platform thinking. Click through to see the highlights of how leaders can optimize strategy in each area.
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