The drift towards digital transformation

There is an increasing trend of CIOs collaborating with business leaders to deliver superior customer experiences. Mobile-powered customer experiences are expected to fuel digital transformation in Asia Pacific in 2015. Read more about other digital trends for 2015

– Preeti Gaur

“In a world of ever-increasing digital demands and shrinking budgets, CIOs need to be smarter with where they place their bets,” writes Dane Anderson, Vice President, Research Director, Region Manager for Asia Pacific, Forrester Research. “Successful CIOs in 2015 will improve collaboration with business leaders to craft superior customer experiences.”

The top predictions for 2015, and their implications are:

1.    Digital transformation will drive technology spending growth of 4.9 per cent

79 per cent of organizations consider improving the experience of technology -empowered customers as a high or critical priority for their business in 2015. While 57 per cent of businesses across the region see the rising expectations of customers as the number one reason to spend more money on ICT purchases in 2015.

2.    Majority of companies in Asia Pacific will be unprepared for Digital Disruption

Although powerhouses in China like Alibaba and Haier Group are leading the regional charge to digital business success, few local and regional companies understand what it takes to build a digital business yet. Regional organizational inertia will be the biggest hurdle to digital transformation in 2015 and Forrester expects Asia Pacific organizations to be complacent to the growing wave of global digital business houses crashing in their backyards.

3.    China will be the epicenter of Digital innovation

Fuelled by its massive digital population, a lack of legacy approaches and well-funded digital behemoths, China is set to become the world’s largest eCommerce market by 2015, with market gains of $315.3 billion in online sales (B2C and C2C). China’s social media arena is also developing at lightning speed with 95 per cent of metropolitan Chinese online adults using social media today.

4.    ‘Digital India’ will encounter stubborn roadblocks

The Indian government’s $17 billion ambitious Digital India program has the potential to be a game changer for the country. While we applaud the Indian government’s program to transform India to a digitally empowered knowledge economy, the program will face key ground-level challenges in terms of infrastructure operations and standards as well as the lack of technology management involvement.

5.    Mobile business will lag accelerated smartphone adoption

By the end of 2015, 36 per cent of adults in Asia will own a smartphone – ownership ranges from a high of 86 per cent in Singapore to 44 per cent in China and a low of 23 per cent in India. However, few companies will be ready to serve these technology-empowered customers on their smartphones in their moments of need. Mobile will remain small in terms of spend – particularly advertising spend.

6.    Organizations will move beyond rudimentary enterprise mobility

In 2015, a significant number of small, medium and large businesses across Asia Pacific begin are expected to embrace hybrid tablet/laptop devices as a start of their enterprise mobility journey. A growing proportion of forward-thinking businesses in Asia Pacific will begin to examine their employee’s mobile moments and those who succeed will think customer mobility, not enterprise mobility.

Among other things, in 2015, regional CMOs will become increasingly aware of their technology limitations and the drag that the lack of proper planning on integration, application management, security and compliance will place on their marketing agility.

At the same time, CIOs will shift focus from back-end IT systems to customer-facing business technology. The meeting point between these two forces will be customer experience initiatives.

Also, with more than one billion users combined on WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber and WhatsApp, Forrester expects regional organizations to increasingly turn to mobile messaging apps for customer engagement.

Source: Forrester