Businesses can be categorized into four groups based on their future readiness: Current Focused, Future Aware, Future Focused, and Future Creators. Future Creators have a significant advantage over their Current Focused counterparts when evaluating key performance indicators. Companies in the Asia Pacific region that are the most future-ready show improvements across eight different business metrics.
Source: Dell infographic. The four things that future-ready organisations are more likely to do.
Dell recently released findings from a global study conducted by IDC, an analyst firm. This study, commissioned by Dell, highlights the connection between IT innovation and positive business outcomes for organizations in the Asia Pacific region. The research, which tracked data from 2012 to 2015, revealed measurable business improvements directly linked to the adoption of future-ready IT solutions.
The most future-forward organizations in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region report these key advantages:
- A greater than 50% increase in both customer satisfaction/retention and revenue generated from new products.
- An increase of over 40% in various areas: revenue, sales, bookings, on-time customer delivery, regulatory compliance, new product and service time-to-market, and new customer acquisition.
- A 39% boost in employee productivity.
Based on the collected data, IDC categorized companies into four groups: 16% as Current Focused, 32% as Future Aware, 33% as Future Focused, and 18% as Future Creators. Future Creators represent the most future-ready businesses, leveraging agile platforms and big data. In contrast, Current Focused organizations remain reliant on traditional IT and are at the initial stages of their technology journey.
“The Future Ready Enterprise Index demonstrates that the most future-ready organizations effectively foster agility, scalability, and innovation by embracing converged infrastructures, cloud technology, big data, and analytics solutions. By outlining four distinct stages of future readiness, the white paper clearly emphasizes that being a ‘Future Creator’ in the Asia Pacific region offers a distinct competitive advantage. Conversely, remaining ‘Current Focused’ can be detrimental. Businesses that understand their position in their journey and adapt practices within their unique context will maximize their technology investments,” explained Peter Marrs, Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, Dell APJ.
The survey highlights that organizations need real-time insights to make well-informed decisions for optimal business outcomes. Solutions capable of integrating multiple data types and sources to provide readily available, relevant data for decision-making haven’t been readily accessible and often require specialized expertise to develop.
The Future Ready Enterprise Index revealed that Current Focused organizations generally lack a comprehensive big data and analytics strategy. Any insights gained from this data tend to have minimal impact on decision-making. In contrast, Future Creators have implemented a company-wide big data and analytics strategy, and decision-makers highly value the insights derived from this data. In the Asia Pacific region, 98% of Future Creator decision-makers can access big data and analytics insights at the crucial moment, compared to only 58% of executives in Current Focused organizations. This data accessibility translates into quicker organizational responses to change, ultimately leading to better business results.
The study indicated that business units within Current Focused organizations are not implementing IT-driven cloud strategies. Instead, they rely on public software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings in an ad hoc manner. In contrast, Future Creators manage cross-cloud catalogs, including audit/security and data control measures.
Over 50% of Future Creators in the APJ region reported that cloud adoption facilitated big data and analytics within their businesses. Most have experienced more efficient use of infrastructure and data resources. These advancements enabled respondents to monitor usage and performance, leading to increased productivity and optimized outputs.
One example of a Future Creator successfully implementing cloud technologies to leverage IT and data resources is Samitivej Hospital in Bangkok. This private healthcare provider, with a network of facilities across Thailand, employs 3,000 healthcare professionals. The hospital upgraded its IT infrastructure, including data center storage, cloud computing, and data recovery functions. These upgrades positioned the hospital to be future-ready, enabling them to provide enhanced, more efficient, and cost-effective patient care.
Future Creator respondents from the Asia Pacific region highlighted several key benefits of using hyperconverged infrastructures: improved resource utilization, increased IT staff productivity, enhanced business agility, and greater flexibility in adapting to market changes.
For instance, eResearch South Australia, a collaborative effort between the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, and the University of South Australia, established an open-source cloud and high-performance computing infrastructure. This move aimed to enhance their research methodologies. Becoming a Future Creator led to cost savings and empowered their researchers to collaborate remotely across various disciplines, share knowledge, access data more easily, and foster innovation.
While adopting advanced technologies can benefit businesses in their pursuit of future readiness, organizations structured to be Future Creators reap the most significant advantages.
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* The IDC Future-Ready Enterprise Index examined the current state of digital transformation by surveying 2,529 IT executives from 20 industries across the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, India, Brazil, and Mexico. Companies were evenly distributed based on size, with equal representation for those with 100 to 999 employees, 1,000 to 4,999 employees, and 5,000 or more employees. Results were weighted by country/company size using GDP and employment distribution.