Charting a Path towards a Future-Ready Organisation

It’s a known fact that four out of 10 of today’s Fortune 500 companies  will no longer exist in the next 10 years and furthermore, the lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century to just 15 years today . The digital age has taken over and companies must evolve and embrace digital transformation to stay relevant. Companies that have doneso have reaped the benefits in terms of increased revenue, new revenue streams, higher customer satisfaction and higher employee engagement.

 

How future-ready are you?

Needless to say, the world as we know it is in a constant state of flux. Today, thetectonic plates of innovationare progressing at a rate faster than before, and firms must also realise that the pendulum of control is shifting in favour of the customers.

A 2015 IDC Future-Ready Index study commissioned by Dell revealed the extent to which the effectiveness and timeliness of IT service delivery played on business success or failure. A “future-ready” organisation was quicker to react to market changes and also better prepared to become disruptors themselves.IDC identified four levels of enterprise future readiness: Future Creators, Future Focused, Future Aware and Current Focused. 

IDC ranked 16% of respondents as Current Focused, 32% as Future Aware, 33% Future Focused and 18% as Future Creators. At the bottom of the ranking, Current Focused organisations are very much entrenched in legacy technologies; while riding the digital transformation wave are Future Creators,organisations which stay ahead of the game by employing agile platforms and big data. The other categories are missing out on the full benefits of future readiness. 

Asia Pacificis set to be at the forefront of this wave in 2016 –more thanhalf of Future Creators saw an increase in customer satisfaction and over 40% reported a hike in sales.

 

 

The path to becoming a Future Creator

Incumbents across Asia Pacific are not snoozing through this digital wave, and those equipped with far more robust IT infrastructures are rising above the torrents where everything is digital and connected.Here are three IT components that are enabling today’s enterprise to keep succeeding.

- Big Data Analytics (BDA) produce deeper business insights 

BDA serves as a gateway to deliver data to the right stakeholders at the right time, with most advanced organisations also using BDA to automate critical business functions for improved accuracy and efficiency. The Future Ready Enterprise Index has found that Current Focused organisations have little or no BDA strategy, and any BDA outputs typically have little or no influence on decision makers. In contrast, Future Creators have implemented enterprise-wide BDA strategy, with findings treated seriously by decision makers.In Asia Pacific, 98% of Future Creators have access to BDA at the optimal time as compared to only 58% of Current Focused organisations.

- Cloud computing breaks down silos  

When it comes to agility, disaster recovery and mobility, organisations turn to the cloud. Let us recalibrate our compasses to the East –faced with road congestion issues, Fujian University of Technology leveraged real-time data from the cloudto analyse driving patterns, successfully helping the Fujian province to build a Smart City transportation strategy to manage rising vehicle numbers.In Asia Pacific, over 50% of “Future Creator” organisations noted that cloud adoption has enabled BDA within their business, and most have seen more effective use of infrastructure and data resources. These have allowed the respondents to track usage and performance, leading to greater productivity and optimised outputs across the organisation.

- Converged infrastructure reduces complexity

Virtualisation and automation were created to deal with isolated legacy infrastructure, but when new storage and servers come into play, a converged infrastructure can greatly streamline processes. It integrates bundles of hardware and software components into a single, streamlined package for businesses to operate at scale. For example, a healthcare organisation can more quickly and cost effectively implement mandated electronic medical records systems while also implementing an infrastructure for the rapid development of new, data-intensive personalised medicine services. FutureCreator respondents from Asia Pacific highlighted greater resource utilisation and staff productivity as the top benefits of hyper-converged infrastructures.

Combined, these technology elements become virtual armours to the future-minded IT department in enterprises. Disruptors win because they put data at their core, and decision makers need to harness these elements to future-proof their businesses.

Future readiness is a journey

Businesses across industries have yielded the tremendous benefits of digitisation, whereby information technology is differentiating themselves from the competition and supporting ongoing business processes. Take for examplethe education institute Yale-NUS College in Singapore, its hybrid cloud infrastructure is supporting breakthrough research in areas such as digital humanities. Digital humanities supports research work using IT in areas such as decoding ancient texts, searching huge archives of historical unstructured data and forecasting political events based on social media. Researchers are gaining knowledge of past and present world events that would not have been possible without the compute power of the cloud. 

You don’t need to be a Future Creator to enjoy greater business outcomes.Future readiness is a journey, and moving up a single level regardless of your starting point can impact the business. However, two elements remain fundamental for success across all levels: a strategic approach that drives business decisions (versus a short-term focus on cost reduction) and an IT organisation that can work closely with the business to address the needs of the organisation.