Digital transformation is at the helm of Australia’s priorities at the start of the year. With the goal of building Australia as the frontrunner of technology and innovation in the Asia-Pacific, many Australian organisations included digital shift as one of their targets.

In a released Digital Transformation Trends in Australia by International Data Corporation (IDC), they suggested areas of priority for Australian organisations to achieve their digital transformation (DX) until 2025. 

In IDC’s vision for DX through 2025, company culture served as the foundation of digital excellence.

“By 2024, the leaders of 50% of Australian organisations will have mastered ‘future of culture’ traits, such as empathy, empowerment, innovation, and customer data centricity as they seek digital leadership at scale,” said IDC Australia & New Zealand research director Louise Francis.

“This will, in turn, accelerate co-innovation and enable businesses to respond to market changes at hyperspeed as the enterprise learns a single entity and at scale.”

This year, the emphasis shifts from digital transformation technologies to the underlying organisational structures and innovation ecosystems. IDC predicts in 2020 that the adoption of digital key performance indicators (KPIs) will gain deeper insight into the business value of digital transformation.

With the DX budgets and effectiveness come under scrutiny, there’s a demand for metrics for effectiveness and other appropriate measurements to demonstrate the true value and return of investment (ROI) on these efforts. With resources poured to cater DX than traditional IT budgets, “it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ businesses will move to an enriched metrics model,” said Francis.

Here are the 10 Digital Transformation Trends in Australia according to the IDC report this year.

1.Future of Culture

Half of the leaders in AXS200 organisations will have mastered the future of culture traits by 2024. These traits include empathy, empowerment, innovation, and customer data centricity to achieve leadership as scale.

2. Digital Co-Innovation

Empathy among brands and for customers will drive ecosystem collaboration and co-innovation by 2022. Partners and competitors will drive 20% collective growth in customer lifetime value.

3. AI at Scale

AI-powered organisations will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners at least 20% faster than their colleagues. Companies will be proactive and implement hyperspeed organisational changes and market reactions.

4. Digital Offerings

Organisations who neglect to invest in market-driven operations (40%) will lose market share to existing competitors that invested early on as well as the new digital entries by 2022.

5. Digitally Enhanced Workers

Two years from now, there will be a “Future of Work” practices that expand the functionality and effectiveness of the digital workforce by 25 per cent. This will fuel an acceleration of productivity and innovation in organisations that practises digital transformation.

6. Digital Investment

Compared to 45% spending on overall ICT investment in 2020, DX spending will grow to over 55% by 2021. Companies are moving to create information-based competitive advantages which lead to investment growth in data intelligence and analytics.

7. Ecosystem Force Multipliers

Three out of four digital leaders will devise and differentiate end customer value measures from their platform ecosystem participation. The estimate of the ecosystem’s multiplier effects is also included.

8. Digital KPIs Maturity

One of three companies would have aligned their digital KPIs to direct business value measures of revenue and profitability by 2020. This eliminates today’s measurement crisis in which digital transformation KPIs are not directly aligned.

9. Platform Modernise

Organisations will aggressively modernise their legacy systems by 2023. With the increasing cyber threats and the need for additional functionalities, 68% of businesses will extensively improve their new technology platform investments in the next three years.

10. Insight Investment

Enterprises seeking to monetise the benefits of new intelligence technologies will invest US$5.5 billion in Australia by 2023. This makes digital transformation analytics, prediction, and AI at the helm of digital innovation.

With the year ahead, we would likely witness greater growth for technology and digital transformation.

Which digital transformation trend are you looking forward to seeing in 2021? Share your thoughts in the comments!