Call to action — innovation and transformation

Our survey respondents see a world of transformation, innovation and disruptive change amid challenges relating to people, culture, security and resiliency. Over the next 10 years, their critical priorities include the acquisition and retention of talent and reskilling and upskilling existing employees to sustain their organization's relevance and realize the full potential of its transformation journey. With incumbents facing more agile business models, technology is now the path forward rather than a mere tool.

Following are steps companies should undertake or continue over the near term to ensure they can increase their agility and sustain their transformation journey successfully over the long term:

• Modernize legacy applications. Address accumulated “technical debt” to drive efficiency in business and IT systems, reduce infrastructure costs by streamlining services and moving core applications and services to the cloud, and improve capacity to innovate to enrich customer experiences, digitize products and services, inform decision-making, and compete with “born digital” players with architecture built optimally from the ground up.
• Improve agility through rapid response and strong operational resilience. Become a resilient and compliant organization that can readily respond to outages, crises and other threats to running the business. Strong resilience is inclusive of operational resilience, cyber resilience, technical resilience, business continuity management and managing third-party vendor risk.
• Capitalize on the emergence of new technology platforms and capabilities. Invest in leveraging new platforms and architectures for building and running business applications to enable better access to data, provide flexibility and faster time to market, and support digital capabilities to deliver differentiated experiences. Deploy greater process automation and intelligent technologies such as AI, machine learning and augmented reality/virtual reality to reimagine existing processes and alleviate risks from the inevitable shifts in labor availability and costs.
• Leverage insights and analytics from data. Employ advanced business analytics and reporting to evolve the organization, drive strategic decision-making, accelerate the achievement of business goals and be more competitive in the market.
• Maximize customer engagement. Focus on the experiences of users and consumers to drive interaction through a modern, innovative operating model. Decisions based on insightful customer and user analytics are more likely to achieve business success. Invest in an event-streaming platform that facilitates smart apps that can react to events as they happen by developing tailored and immediate experiences customers are expecting.
• Prioritize cybersecurity and data privacy. Harness the power of effective cybersecurity frameworks to combat a constantly changing threat environment. Balance identity and access management to ensure maximum speed of user access while managing risk. Ensure proper management of sensitive customer data while complying with applicable legal and regulatory requirements for collecting, storing, securing, processing and using sensitive data.
• Determine the capabilities needed to manage, secure and govern APIs. The growing use of application programming interfaces (APIs) in today's digital economy (“the API economy”) has brought about new business models, risks and opportunities. As the organization adopts architecture for providing standards enabling computer systems to communicate with each other, leaders must manage the exposure of the organization's digital services and assets through APIs.