Digital business leaders pulling ahead of the pack, digital businesses on the rise: Gartner

New survey results from Gartner Inc. show a widening gap forming between organizations already undertaking digital business initiatives and those only in the planning stage, demonstrating a clear need to invest in digital business.

Findings from the 2015 Digital Business Survey, released last week, reflect input received by Gartner, which fielded 304 surveys in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia this past May and June, notes a statement from the information technology research and advisory company.

Survey results show 32% of polled business and marketing executives at organizations with US$250 million or more in annual revenue have a business that is a digital business, Gartner reports. This is up from 22% in the same survey last year.

Defining digital business as the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds, respondents were asked to rank the importance of five success factors. Results were broken down according to whether companies were using digital marketing techniques (a precursor to digital business), were planning digital business or had already implemented digital business.

“Not surprisingly, the last group accorded more importance to design and moments, which are necessary to execute digital business,” Jorge Lopez, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says in the statement. Survey results “underlined how digital business leaders are more likely than others to focus on design and the creation of new digital business moments,” Lopez says.

Patrick Meehan, research vice president at Gartner, says digital business moments – catalysts that set in motion a series of events and actions involving a network of people, businesses and things that spans or crosses multiple industries and multiple ecosystems – “of untapped opportunity and competition can rapidly change the dynamics across industries.”

That being the case, Meehan points out, “the successful design and development of business moments, which the company can replicate, are the most significant undertaking an organization working to become a digital business can take.”

Other survey findings include the following:

• the top priority for digital business front-runners is adopting new technology (70%), followed by creating a highly collaborative environment (56%) and supporting customer-driven technology change (53%);
• organizational leaders overwhelmingly report they believe the impact of digital business over the next five years will be positive, anticipating improvements in customer experience and engagement (86%), IT organization (86%), workforce productivity (84%) and sales organization (83%);
• just 7% of surveyed organizations project that digital business will have a negative or significant negative impact in staff, and 6% in mergers and acquisitions; and
• executives already in digital business are invested in piloting and deploying, while those at companies in the planning phase are focusing on investigation and experimentation.

“In practical terms, a company that is moving from strategy to execution will have fewer steps to reach its goals compared with one that has to insert a separate planning process for digital business,” Gartner reports. “Over time, even if the faster team stumbles, it can recover more rapidly than one that has more process for strategy,” the company adds.

But organization moving forward with digital business should not discount the potential disruptive effects, Lopez suggests, pointing to music, books, photographs and newspapers as business models that have been upended.

“Going forward, organizational leaders in other product and service categories will also need to adapt by restructuring the workforce, eliminating obsolete roles, and finding talent that can help design systems and workflows that optimize the use of things integrated with people and business to drive new value for customers,” he adds.