Digital growth under way

More organisations are investing in digital technology.

That’s according to Brenda Pope, KMPG Partner, Advisory and Head of Regional Management Consulting. She made the comments at the recently held KPMG Second Annual Chief Information Officers (CIO) Forum, as she noted that over the past 24 months there has been continued increase in the proportion of organisations with an enterprise-wide digital strategy. She was at the time referring to the findings of the latest Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey.

“Now around one in seven organisations have an enterprise-wide strategy and at this rate you can expect the majority of organisations to have a digital strategy by 2018. Another indication is organisations that have a CDO, Chief Data or Digital Officer appointment. Last year, we saw a levelling out of CDO appointments after an initial growth spurt and we had speculated whether the CDOs had reached its peak. This year, we have seen another spurt up to 25 per cent,” she said.

Pope went on to indicate that the survey showed that 18 per cent of organisations thought that their digital strategy was very effective, 19 per cent thought it was not very effective and 63 per cent suggested it was moderate. Moreover, she said that it was found that 42 per cent are more likely to manage risks and security very effectively.

Her comments came as she added that digital leaders are investing in digital labour at four times the average rate. With that in mind, Pope maintained that “robots are coming” and she explained machines are not now only substituted for manual human tasks, but actually cognitive ones as well.

“We found that over one-third of organisations are expecting to invest or are already doing so in some form of digital labour and this rises to two-thirds for larger organisations. Also we found, when asked what value was being derived from the investments, we got a clear message that the single biggest factor was improving the quality rather than just the cost… It seems at this early stage of development, automation is about improvement and growth, rather than pure efficiency and maybe this sometimes runs a little counter to what we’ve seen in newspapers and on the net,” she said.

Noting also that there was a 44 per cent increase in the head count in the IT departments, only 16 per cent recorded a decrease, she explained that automation does not at this time necessarily equate to job losses. (JRT)