Crisis as catalyst: Speeding up digital transformation

As the second-ranked growth strategy for the coming year and the third-ranked priority for the next three years, digital transformation has become a significant area of focus. Deloitte’s  survey finds executives have broad expectations about the gains that these technology investments will deliver for their organizations. Among other benefits, they believed digital transformation would help improve customer engagement, boost sales volumes, strengthen their ability to manage, and minimize costs.

What is especially notable is that many of them are much closer to realizing these ambitions than before the pandemic. Nearly seven of every 10 companies surveyed said their digital transformation significantly accelerated during the crisis. While more than a quarter had started their transformation prior to COVID-19, more than half said they initiated it in response to the crisis or are in the process now. Highly resilient organizations were nearly twice as likely (80 percent versus 43 percent) as those with low resilience scores to say that their process of digital transformation was either conducted prior to the crisis or is currently underway.

This urgency makes abundant sense- in a matter of weeks, COVID-19 forced radical changes in customer behavior, moved a significant portion of the economy online, and increased people’s comfort and willingness to engage digitally.

In addition to moving with much greater haste, the organizations represented in Deloitte‘s survey are also increasing the breadth of their technology investments. Information security is projected to be the highest technology spending area in the coming 12 months, but cloud computing and data analytics are close behind. A significant portion of the respondents also predict their companies will invest in emerging technologies such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and drones.

Deloitte’s latest Tech Trends report highlights ways these organizations can maximize their investments in technology areas where they are focusing their digital transformation efforts. One trend, for instance, has businesses elevating their planning processes with tech-enabled strategy platforms that help business leaders apply data analytics to think more expansively and precisely about a wide range of future scenarios. Another article on artificial intelligence reveals how machine learning is evolving to help cut through mountains of collected information to focus on data that is “good enough” for informing smarter human decisions.