Survey warns Australian businesses may be in “digital denial”

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news A new survey by Progress Software has found that, while most Australian business leaders recognise the benefits of going digital, over half said their organisations were “in denial” over the urgent need to transform their processes and services.

The report, titled Are Businesses Really Digitally transforming or Living in Digital Denial, was commissioned to shed light on today’s digital transformation challenges and “equip businesses with the information they need to succeed”, Progress said.

“Surprisingly 65 percent of Australian businesses leaders say their organisation is in denial about the need to digitally transform processes or services, yet 90 percent see digital transformation as important or critical,” said Craig Law, Managing Director of Progress Australia and New Zealand.

The results also revealed that a majority (69 percent) of Australian business leaders believe their firms have just two years to digitally transform before suffering “financial or competitive consequences” – while 39 percent said this could a year or less, and 63 percent are worried they may already have missed the boat.

Concerning what aspect of their business might be the main driver for digital transformation, 67 percent said it would be optimising customer experiences and engagement, while 71 percent believe IT is more likely to be the final decision maker/budget holder for digital initiatives.

Many also felt they are are hitting “roadblocks” through lack of internal alignment, lack of adequate skills and cultural resistance. Furthermore, 69 percent believe the biggest barrier to delivering a compelling customer experience is lack of digital leadership.

“There are four fundamentals for success – optimize customer engagement, collaborate with partners, unburden IT and simplify operations,” said Law. “Digital transformation is driving this shift and while virtually every business understands this, they struggle to know where to begin.”

The research polled over 700 global (including 52 Australian) C-Level/VP decision makers, heads of marketing, digital and IT, and others. The respondents represented organisations ranging from SMBs to large global enterprises.

Alongside the survey, Progress announced its DigitalFactory cloud-based solutions, that it said will provide “solutions to combat digital denial and enable enterprises to harness the full potential of digital business”.

1 COMMENT

  1. Hard to persue digital when upload speeds across the nation are crippling. We would love to do remote offsite backup, offsite surveillance, remote workers etc, but the cost of change from an unreliable adsl line to bonded dsl (which apparently they cant do at our exchange) to fiber costs is just crippling. how can you justify going from 60 per month to 1300 per month. its obscene. We actually have a fiber cable running to our building too, optus got telstra wholesale to install it for our fixed line service (we were using ISDN lines), but optus cant sell internet over the same line because its telstra wholesales. the stupid state of our nations communications infrastructure.

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