Enterprises will experience major digital transformation next year as they strive to improve a host of key tech and non-tech functions, as all business departments begin to champion technology investment.
“Digital transformation is fast becoming an organisational issue,” says Adrian De Luca, Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific.
“It is no longer just CIOs who are championing the need for digital change, but leaders across all business functions.”
For example, De Luca believes CMOs are finding that traditional ways of marketing are not as effective any more, while CFOs are discovering that consumer and supplier transaction models have shifted.
“There is now an almost universal understanding within businesses that all functions need to look at how they transform their own practices through digitisation,” De Luca adds.
Looking ahead, De Luca cited digital transformation, smart cities, cross modal IT, multi-cloud, and skills shortages as the five key trends that will continue to shape both the IT and business landscapes in Asia Pacific for 2016.
Traditional enterprises will transform into digital natives
“There has been a resurgence in confidence among CIOs that they will see more of their revenues flowing through digital channels,” De Luca says.
According to the Gartner CIO Agenda Insights report, only 16 percent of CIOs last year expected the revenues in their business to flow through digital channels, but that has more than doubled this year to 37 percent.
For De Luca, this is recognition of the fact that digital initiatives are not just coming from the CIO, but from all functions of the business that are creating their own platforms and hiring digital natives.
“Today’s CMOs no longer go to the IT department to build their systems,” De Luca adds.
“They go directly to the providers and acquire them as a service. The same is true of businesses as a whole.
“Rather than waiting for a vendor or a competitor to develop a new platform, organisations are building and actively disrupting their own current systems.”
Smart companies will build smart cities
Smart cities have been a topic of interest for a long time in Asia Pacific, with many countries in the region rolling out their own initiatives to tackle everything from public safety to improved transportation.
However, De Luca believes it has become apparent that few governments have the experience or the financial means to build and run these initiatives on their own.
“Instead, they are partnering with major industry players who are investing deeply in the Internet of Things (IoT),” De Luca adds.
“By bringing their own intellectual property, assembling ecosystems of technology providers and integrating them together, they can develop the solutions needed to make these cities a reality.”
De Luca says this means that smart companies will act as the catalysts for making smart cities a reality, as governments open the door through initiatives like Digital India, Smart Nation Singapore, and Digital China.
The business opportunities for companies in the sector are huge, with the annual smart city investment in technology alone set to quadruple to $US11.3 billion by 2023, according to Navigant Research.
Cross-modal IT will unify business silos
De Luca believes it is now recognised that there are two modes that IT organisations can follow to meet the needs of the digital enterprise.
Mode 1 - Applications that handle traditional systems of record - such as CRM and e-commerce systems.
“These systems are built around predictability, accuracy and availability, given the sensitive data they hold,” De Luca explains.
Mode 2 - Systems of insight, that are more exploratory such as big data analytics.
“They give a perspective of what is going on inside a business, enabling users to test certain hypotheses by layering datasets over each other,” De Luca adds.