The benefits of digitising your enterprise

It is this rapid growth and availability of information that has taken place over the past two decades - and that has accelerated in recent years thanks in large part to the Internet - that has become known as 'Big Data'. Yet 'Big Data' is not those slideshows and spreadsheets that you have saved on your laptop. It is information that is too much to store, handle and analyse without specific tools.

Harnessing big data

Consultancy group McKinsey & Company conducted a survey in 2011 and found that companies with more than 1000 employees store, on average, more than 235 terabytes of data, which is more data than is contained in the U.S. Library of Congress. (And since that survey is already three years old, the amount of data has probably increased exponentially by now.)

In order for companies to keep up and harness all that data effectively, they need to digitise. And business modernisation will be big business, because experts predict that digital spend will be huge, contributing more than 80% of incremental IT spending over the remainder of this decade. IDC projects that digital spending, including social, mobile, analytics and cloud, will reach approximately $940bn by 2017.

But the spending will pay off. According to MIT and the Centre for Digital Business, organisations that rank highly in "digital intensity", generate 6 - 9% more revenue than those that do not. And those that rank highly in "transformation management intensity" - which is a C-Level investment in the digital agenda, according to an article on SDLCPartners.com - outperform their counterparts by 9 - 26%. And the organisations that excel in both digital intensity and transformation management intensity, are 26% more profitable than their industry competitors.

Room for improvement

A new McKinsey survey has found that companies are gaining traction with digital initiatives, with CEOs getting more involved in digital efforts than ever before and with their enterprises investing enough money to meet their overall digital goals. Yet the same survey revealed that there was also still room for improvement, with less than 40% of executives saying that their companies have accountability measures in place, either through targets, incentives, or "owners" of digital programs, while only 7% say their organisations understand the exact value that is at stake from digital.

Ageing technology is not just slow and frustrating to work with, but it can potentially cripple your business with disruptive technical failures and old, outdated software. And not only can they expect a better return on investment, but those companies that embrace digital also experience other advantages such as increased productivity; reduced production costs on their products as well as reduced time to get those products on the market; enhanced customer experiences; and greater innovation.