As businesses are rapidly moving towards digital transformation, 59 percent of CIOs have said that IT budgets would remain constant after COVID-19 crisis.
A report by Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of B2B data, insights and AI-driven platforms released a survey-based report titled ‘Smart Digital Transformation: How CIO’s are leading their organisation’s data strategy, recorded the responses of 250 CIO’s representing their respective business with about INR 5 billion across 10 sectors and six major cities in India.
The survey represents that business leaders have now accepted that COVID-19 is more than a short term hurdle.
The CIO’s are prioritising and planning for enhancements for technology, data quality and automation capabilities in order to help them manage any disruption caused in the future due to the pandemic.
Invest more in tech
According to the report, 56 percent of the CIOs plan to invest in more technologies to overcome data management challenges, demonstrating that better technology and data quality have gone from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” status in the current times.
“CIOs are playing a pivotal role in navigating businesses through the current challenging times, while also ensuring to embrace the new normal in the connected world.
With digitisation, the rate of data generation has increased considerably. Our survey indicates that most of the Indian companies (57%) are embracing automation for managing and refreshing data to ensure there is always Live Data available for business decisions.
Further, 30% of them believe that Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning will be the most likely technology that they would adopt soon,” said Avinash Gupta, Managing Director & CEO, Dun & Bradstreet India.
“As businesses were pushed to digitise almost overnight, their legacy systems were not adequately equipped to manage the volume and velocity of the data explosion that we are witnessing today.
Our interaction with the CIO fraternity indicated that lack of technology maturity and delay in investment towards evolving data management practices are preventing them from exploring the full potential of data.
Most businesses are struggling with real-time data analytics and management.
High cost of data solutions, poor data quality, data integration issues, concerns with processing large datasets and handling constantly changing data are some of the core issues.
It is now evident that an increasing percentage of CIOs are now realising the need to invest in technologies to improve the data management practices,” said Dr. Arun Singh, Global Chief Economist, Dun & Bradstreet.
The report further added that CIOs are becoming mindful of the missed opportunities that poor data quality can result in, versus a notable customer journey created with the help of good data collection and management practices.
This is also reflected in a shift in their focus from primarily increasing cost efficiency.
55 percent of surveyed CIOs are currently spending their time on value creation for the business.
The survey also stated that Data security for overall business is at the top priority for about 52 percent CIOs and remote working for 48 percent CIO’s.
Insights from CIO’s
“Data management is coming into prominence as more and more organizations are turning to data for decision making.
The numbers do not reflect the urgency of the situation, the reality is that most enterprises are struggling to present data in a meaningful way to the decision makers.
With extremely limited physical meetings and interactions with interplay between the CXOs, they are beginning to realize the value that data brings to the discussion and decision making,” said Arun Gupta, Technology Advisor, Shalby Limited.
He further added that it is important for CIOs to fix the process of data capture at source along with the tools to ensure accuracy, manageability and finally the ability to analyse going beyond the past predictors to actionable insights that impact future business outcomes.
“Automation and future technologies are reshaping the way businesses operate and are the key driving business efforts. Automation technology revenue will increase by 19.5% in 2021, and continue to grow at double-digit rates through 2024.
Automation and future technologies will be reinventing our digital transformation,” said Pinkes Ambvat, CIO & Director of IT, CRIF India.
Key findings of the survey
About 60 percent of the responding CIOs stated that at least 10 percent of the total revenue was allocated towards their business unit and 33 percent of the CIOs stated that more than 20 percent of the total revenue was allocated towards their business units
59 percent of the CIOs predicted that their department’s budget would remain constant even after COVID-19, while 10 percent of CIOs foresee an increase and 31 percent of the CIOs expect their department’s budget to decrease after COVID-19.
The crisis-driven impetus towards value creation even supersedes more traditional goals of CIOs such as driving operational efficiency and reducing cost.
55 percent of the responding CIOs said they spend their time on value creation for their business compared to 40 percent of CIOs spending their time on cost savings.
56 percent CIOs plan to invest more in technologies to overcome data management challenges, demonstrating that better technology and data quality have gone from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” status in the current times.
49 percent CIOs plan to combat data management challenges by hiring more data professionals, while 32 percent CIOs plan to seek services from a third party.
53 percent of the CIOs said that they use data tracking (web database) to collect data, while 31 percent of the CIOs collect data through primary ways, and 27 percent of the CIOs source data from third parties i.e., data service providers and social media.
Further, 26 percent of the CIOs source data through websites, cookies and web beacons.
Real time data analytics the ability to obtain meaning from data as quickly as the data arrives was cited as an issue by 52 percent of CIOs, followed closely by data security which was cited by 50 percent of CIOs.
Two in five CIOs agree that their business is facing difficulty in using the full potential of data.
43 percent of the CIOs do not use automation currently, of which 24 percent are willing to explore it without any hesitation, 14 percent are not willing to try and another 5 percent are hesitant but might try.
