IDC’s top 10 DX trends for NZ

Global technology research company IDC has released its 2020 Top 10 digital transformation (DX) trends for New Zealand.

The report, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2020 Predictions – A New Zealand Perspective, provides IDC's vision for DX through to 2025 supplying direction to New Zealand organisations on where they should be prioritising investment to become digital leaders.

From 2020 IDC predicts that the focus of DX in leading New Zealand organisations will shift from the technology to the enablers of DX excellence.  The future of culture, co-innovation, smart ecosystems, cybersecure platforms and the digitally enhanced workplace will be on DX Leaders agenda by 2023, or earlier.

"The 2020 DX predictions reflect the importance New Zealand businesses are placing on the underlying organisational structures and processes, rather than the technology itself, " says IDC New Zealand country manager Louise Francis.

"Businesses are getting a much better handle on how DX innovations can be integrated and embedded across the organisation and as a result are looking at how to supercharge their capabilities to compete in a digital economy, from AI at scale to digitally enhanced workers."

In the near term, almost half of organisations will have shifted from legacy key performance indicators (KPIs) to enhanced digital metrics by 2020, to gain a deep insight into the business value of DX.

"The agility and scale required of organisations undertaking DX initiatives mean that traditional metrics are no longer accurate indicators of performance," says Francis.

"With DX spending in New Zealand set to grow to over 55% of all ICT investment within the next two years, it will be critical for businesses to invest in data intelligence and metrics that resonate with the business. This will provide businesses with the capability to move beyond islands of innovation to a holistic and embedded approach for accelerated value and enhanced competitiveness.

Trends at a glance for New Zealand (in no particular order)

• Future of Culture – By 2024, leaders in 60% of NZX listed organisations will have mastered "future of culture" traits such as empathy, empowerment, innovation and customer-data centricity to achieve leadership as scale.
   
• Digital Co-Innovation – By 2022, empathy among brands and for customers, will drive ecosystem collaboration and co-innovation among partners and competitors that will drive 25% collective growth in customer lifetime value.
   
• AI at Scale – By 2022, with proactive, hyper-speed operational changes and market reactions, AI-powered organisations will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners at least 1/3 faster than their peers. 
   
• Digital Offerings – By 2022, 40% of organisations will neglect to invest in market-driven operations and will lose market share to existing competitors that made the investments, as well as to new digital entries. 
   
• Digitally Enhanced Workers – By 2022, new Future of Work practices expand the functionality and effectiveness of the digital workforce by 30%, fueling an acceleration of productivity and innovation at practising organisations.
   
• Digital Investment – By 2022, DX spending will grow to over 55% of all ICT investment from 45% today, with the largest growth in data intelligence and analytics as companies create information-based competitive advantages.
   
• Ecosystem Force Multipliers – By 2024, 75% of digital leaders will devise and differentiate end-customer value measures from their platform ecosystem participation, including an estimate of the ecosystem multiplier effects.
   
• Digital KPIs Mature – By 2020, 45% of companies have aligned digital KPIs to direct business value measures of revenue and profitability, eliminating today's measurement crisis where DX KPIs are not directly aligned.
   
• Platforms Modernise – Driven both by escalating cyberthreats and needed new functionality, 70% of organisations will aggressively modernise legacy systems with extensive new technology platform investments through 2023. 
   
• Invest for Insight – By 2023, enterprises seeking to monetise benefits of new intelligence technologies will invest over NZ$150 million in New Zealand making the DX business decision analytics and AI a nexus for digital innovation.