The Digital Focus – McKinsey Survey
Many organisations, whilst recognising the opportunities of these trends, either do not the place the right level of funding or internal IT capabilities behind these strategies – a cause for concern particularly if competitors are!
Some key takeout points:
- 30% expect digital business to increase operating income by more than 10 percent over the next three years.
- 50% of respondents say their companies’ investments in digital initiatives are too small to deliver on their goals.
- Over 50% of corporates surveyed have made 2 out of the four focus areas (big data, analytics, social tools and digital marketing) a strategic priority
- 27-30% are expecting these tools to provide new business models and revenue streams
- 25% expect to invest over 3% and 40% at least 2%, of their total cost base in these technologies
- 49% are focusing their efforts on using Big Data for customer insights (but less than 13% have meaningfully managed this)
[box style="quote"]Despite their optimism, executives consistently cite two challenges in fulfilling the promise of digital technologies: organizational structures and shortcomings in their infrastructure and IT systems, which can be too inflexible or ill equipped to take advantage of a data-rich world.[/box]
The conclusions from the survey provide a clear set of challenges that organisations are facing:
- the need to have the right skills, training and resources (consultants, partners as well as in-house talent) to develop the strategy and implement.
- the need to orchestrate and integrate efforts internally (often between depts and/or business units) to create a clear commercial strategy. Integrating IT and marketing functions are vital to success and organisations need to align tools and processes to match goals and strategy.
- the internal tranformation to more agile and open structures, culture and processes to quickly shift from insight into deployment – for both marketing and operations
As marketing and data become inseparable the strategic importance for data driven marketing initiatives becomes apparent. The future of marketing is a blended role of systems, technology and analysis combined with a strong understanding of human behaviour to steer the right decisions.
A key start point for any organisation is to develop their awareness of the potential of the four main trends, big data, analytics, social tools and digital marketing, and to understand the full commercial opportunities are available to them.
What are your thoughts on the McKinsey Survey?
