Nearly 80% of companies concerned with digital disruption threat

Nearly 80% of organisations are concerned with disruption and competitive threats, especially from new digital-savvy entrants, a new study by Accenture has found.  

Digital disruption, data explosion, and customer experience are the driving forces behind the need for companies to transform how they do business and move toward Intelligent Operations.    

Data is rapidly shifting from a "peripheral component to a fundamental driver of operations and competitive advantage", said the report

However, nearly 80% of respondents estimate that 50%-90% of their data is unstructured.

Furthermore, data comes from a wide range of sources, including owned first-party data, second-party cooperatives, and subscribed third-party data, as well as enormous amounts of data embedded in internal processes, the report said.  

“Enterprises need a mindset shift to become more data-centric and to maximise and monetise this diverse data,” it detailed.

“A robust customer experience strategy is the most significant driver of operational agility. But nearly 50% of enterprises say their back office is not keeping pace with front-office requirements as they evolve toward the OneOffice that replaces siloed front, middle and back office functions with seamless processes and digital capabilities.

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“The future belongs to organisations with Intelligent Operations: Those that use diverse data driven by applied intelligence and human ingenuity to empower next-generation, real-time decision making, exceptional customer experiences and breakthrough business outcomes.

“With Intelligent Operations at the heart of the enterprise, a company can become more flexible, agile, and responsive; generate value more quickly; and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Intelligent Operations have five essential ingredients that come together in a dial-up or dial-down as-a-Service approach to lasting business process transformation.

“Intelligent Operations provide the agility, flexibility and responsiveness that businesses need to act swiftly to change and steer a new course with confidence.”

The report advises on five essentials for Intelligent Operations:

• Innovative Talent - Entrepreneurial drive, creativity and partnering ability are organisations’ top three areas of talent focus. The talent of the future will need to bring creative problem solving to the enterprise in addition to strong digital, operational and domain expertise. To meet these talent demands, enterprises will need a much more agile human resources function and a more flexible approach to recruiting that heavily leverages an open talent marketplace.
• Data-driven Backbone - Over 90% of organisations believe that data-driven decisions will help them generate breakthrough customer insights. Organisations need to capitalise on the explosion of structured and unstructured data from diverse internal and external sources to gain new insights their innovative talent can use to achieve better outcomes. To that end, over 85% of enterprises are developing a data strategy around data aggregation, data lakes, or data curation, as well as mechanisms to turn data into insights and then actions.
• Applied Intelligence - Nearly 90% of organisations believe the Triple-A Trifecta of automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) will become the holy grail of business and process transformation. To effectively use these powerful tools, companies need innovative talent who can understand the business problem they are trying to solve and then augment this talent with the right combination of people, connectivity and technology to find the answer.
• Leveraging the Power of the Cloud - Over 90% of enterprises researched expect plug-and-play digital services with enterprise-grade holistic security, which is possible today through the power of cloud infrastructure. Capitalising on the cloud, however, will require significant efforts to replace or modernise legacy systems. Recognising this, 25% of respondents indicated they have completed legacy replacement or modernisation and another 42% have concrete plans to do so.
• Smart Partnership Ecosystem - Over 90% of enterprises feel they need to partner closely across the ecosystem to exploit market opportunities. For instance, organisations of the future will develop symbiotic relationships with start-ups, academia, technology providers and platform players to achieve their goals. Similarly, traditional business service providers are increasingly collaborating with enterprises in a true partnership model that maximises co-innovation.

Source: Accenture/HFS Research