Australian businesses have made ample investment in digital technologies. Now it’s time to use technology to transform business and deliver value.
Australia’s businesses are at a critical juncture. After decades of change—both disruptive and insidious in nature—that altered long-held norms and ways of doing business, they face a game-changing choice: Continue working the old-fashioned way and risk punishing outcomes or focus their technology investments on business and operational innovation.
Choosing the latter will require tight alignment of technology initiatives with business goals, process digitization and sure-footed strategic planning. It seems, however, that many Australian businesses are failing to read the writing on the wall.
This, in a nutshell, is a key finding of recent Economist Impact research supported by Cognizant. To learn more, see our report, “Advance Australia prepare: how to make Australian businesses future-ready.”
Our analysis of Economist Impact data reveals that Australian businesses emerged from the pandemic heavy on technology but short on the ability to unlock strategic value from these investments, pivot working capital to drive productivity gains and achieve environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) targets.
What stands out is that Australian businesses are behind their counterparts in other regions when it comes to fully embracing digital-first business models. This has repercussions far and wide.
Business leaders in Australia face three major challenges in achieving these objectives:
1. The transformation gap
Australian organizations are behind other countries in translating high technology adoption into enterprise transformation, from digital business model innovation (strategy) to process digitization (operations). Moreover, the misalignment of business strategy and measurement frameworks means that while projects perform well against traditional IT metrics (being on-budget and on-time), they are not delivering against business objectives.
To what extent are the technologies/methodologies already adopted by your business department delivering strategic value to your operations? (Percent of respondents saying significant value)