Customers have become accustomed to seamless and timely interactions with businesses, regardless of industry. For businesses to successfully engage customers they need to continually provide and optimise new experiences and services. Despite this knowledge, businesses across Australia (AU) and New Zealand (NZ) are lagging significantly behind global companies when it comes to adopting digital. Infosys’ recent study Infosys Digital Acceleration Study: Infosys Australia and New Zealand found that almost a third (30%) of all businesses feel they are trailing behind international counterparts.
Taking your business to the forefront by implementing digital comes with a number of benefits. The main objectives driving digital transformation initiatives in the region are increased sales (53%), operational efficiencies (50%) and higher market share (42%). Overall, it is the ability to be more competitive, leverage new business models to improve operations and see your company grow.
Surprisingly, it’s internal challenges, rather than external market forces, that are holding back businesses in AU and NZ. Some of the main challenges being faced are:
- Operating in organisational silos (38%)
- Highly competitive environment to hire digital natives and ability to build digital skillsets (38%)
- Transforming from a low risk organisation to an organisation that rewards experimentation (37%)
But with the right support, you can adopt digital at scale across your business. Here are our tips for how your business can get ahead:
- C-level Committed to Digital at the Core: Over half (54%) of AU and NZ businesses view implementing organisation level transformation as key to overcoming the challenges they face on their digital transformation journey. Technologies will always evolve, so your business needs to be able to deploy these disruptive business models quickly and seamlessly. Key to this is embedding digital at the core of your business, making it central to your business strategy. This means senior leadership across all departments need to make digital a key focus. It cannot come from the IT department alone and needs to be a key part of your broader business strategy and future planning to be successful.
- Bridging the Digital Skills Gap: Building in-house capabilities is another key support for overcoming the challenges of digital transformation. Creating an environment that enables and rewards continual learning is essential. Building digital skills is a continuous process and hiring is very competitive. It’s not about AI and other technology replacing employees, but instead about involving employees in the digital transformation journey and giving them an opportunity to upskill in an environment that rewards innovation.
Partner’s Digital Transformation Support: AU and NZ businesses indicated that engaging transformation partners for support on the journey is also key. This allows you to focus on building digital products and solutions to better your business, while the partner ecosystem focuses on delivering and managing the building blocks to help you navigate this model. The digital transformation journey is constantly evolving, and with the right support you can achieve this readily.
Ashok Mysore, Vice President, Regional Head – Delivery & Operations.
