The world is digital and customer experiences can make or break brands. Global research firm, IDC, predicts that the paramount importance of customer advocacy will result in 60% of B2C brands embracing Net Promoter Score as their leading success metric by the end of 2020.
So, in order to remain competitive and relevant in the digital world, organizations primarily want to achieve five core objectives:
- Increase their speed and time to market—competitive differentiation
- Improve customer experiences—brand loyalty/reputation
- Mitigate risks and ensure security and compliance—building a digital trust
- Bring cost and operational efficiency—optimizing people, process and money
- Augment and make their staff more productive and retain talent—skills and talent
To this effect, companies around the globe are undertaking a digital transformation journey of some sort. IDC estimates that direct digital transformation (DX) investment spending will be $5.9 trillion over the years 2018 to 2021.
Digital transformation essentially is a technology-based business strategy. But the research shows that less than 6% of organizations have their core IT embedded in digital innovation. In contrast, business-oriented IT will take center stage in DX journeys for a majority of organizations within the next two years. IDC predicts that 60% of CIOs will implement an IT business model and a digital-first culture that focuses on creating digital products and services by 2020 to improve user and employee satisfaction.
Those that have implemented a business-oriented IT are claiming their stake in the digital world because their IT and applications management is smooth, modern, optimized, and automated. This in turn is improving their speed to market, customer experience, technology and business resilience as well as staff productivity and motivation.
This is creating a chasm between the "digital disruptors" and "digital resisters". Feeling the heat from the disruptors that deliver business-aligned IT, three-quarters of organizations IDC surveyed admit that their IT needs to get closer to the business and “develop skills in business strategy.”
In fact, integration of IT with business is the most desired skill needed for DX success. Within this, transforming IT service management (ITSM) and making IT services more agile, responsive and self-service based is considered critical to meet the digital business objectives.
For 83% of businesses, modernizing existing ITSM with a more agile solution was an overwhelming priority. ITSM agility improves IT’s value to the business through faster problem resolution and reduced service desk calls, and in turn improves developer and employee productivity and speed of innovation.
Key Takeaways from the ITSM End-User Study: Overcoming DX Challenges
Existing ITSM strategy is not cutting the mustard and failing enterprises on their core five objectives outlined above. IDC's 2018 ITSM research reveals that:
- The complexity of service desk ticket handling is costly and inefficient, leading to low productivity, directly contrasting with digital business objectives
- Lack of tools to remediate IT problems quickly and to provide effective support of technology for users affects the speed of business for 50% of organizations
- Six out of 10 don’t have the granular visibility to detect IT service issues and fix them quickly, affecting their state of security and robustness
- As IT becomes more fragmented, the existing complex, license and contractual agreements are becoming management headaches affecting security and cost efficiency
- Empowering employees with highly satisfying IT services is a differentiator for competitive advantage
For a majority (60%) of businesses, developing a unified and consistent ITSM strategy to make meaningful comparisons between environments or applications is an important IT priority for DX. What also stood out from the research was the emphasis on simplicity and easier user experience. Improving self-service adoption to resolve business issues faster was important for over half (53%) of large organizations.
The digital era is forcing enterprises to rethink their technology, people, process, and risk strategies, as well as the KPIs to measure them. IDC’s 2018 IT Service Management (ITSM) End-User Study shows that empowering employees with highly satisfying IT services is a differentiator for competitive advantage.
IDC believes that by 2023, 95% of businesses will have incorporated new digital KPI sets focusing on product and service innovation rates, data capitalization, and employee experience to navigate the digital economy. If it is your vision to be the pathfinder and creator of this digital economy, then seize it in 2019!
