Research reveals impact of tech investment and business growth

Alan Nöthnagel, director at Accenture Technology in Africa

The new research, titled: Full Value. Full Stop. How to scale innovation and achieve full value with Future Systems, provides insights on how to scale innovation and achieve the full value of technology investments, builds on Accenture’s initial Future Systems report launched last year, and is based on a survey of more than 8,300 organisations across 20 industries and 20 countries.

It is designed to help companies understand and close the innovation achievement gap - defined as the difference between potential and realised value from technology investments.

The Future Systems research is Accenture’s largest enterprise IT survey ever conducted and includes measures of both mature and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and extended reality. It scored companies on three important dimensions: technology adoption, depth of technology adoption, and organisational and cultural readiness.

By assigning a score for each of these key factors, the study determined which companies were ‘Leaders’ (top 10%) and which were ‘Laggards’ (bottom 25%). Tracking performance indicators between 2015 and 2023 (projected), the study identifies the relationship between technology adoption and value achieved, finding that leaders grow revenue at more than twice the rate of Laggards.

Moreover, in 2018 alone, Laggards surrendered 15% in foregone annual revenue, and stand to potentially miss out on an astonishing 46% in revenue gains by 2023 if they do not change their enterprise technology approach.

“Today’s C-suite is investing staggering amounts of money in new technology, but not every company is realising the benefits of innovation as a result of those investments,” said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services.

“Competing in today’s data-driven, post-digital economy means organizations need to have a carefully calibrated strategy toward technology adoption and a clear vision for what their companies’ future systems should look like. Our newest research reveals that the world’s leading companies are investing in boundaryless, adaptable and radically human systems to maximise innovation, business performance and value.”

According to Alan Nöthnagel, director at Accenture Technology in Africa, “the successful enterprise of tomorrow will be those which no longer think of infrastructure, applications and employees as standalone entities, but as interconnected living systems enabling turnkey innovation delivery.”

Fundamentally, leaders believe that humans and machines can bring out the best in each other while companies and their ecosystems can form mutual alliances. It’s one reason they’re motivated to build future systems that are boundaryless, adaptable and radically human, which the study defines as follows:

• Boundaryless: Boundaryless systems take advantage of blurring boundaries - within the IT stack, between companies, and between humans and machines - to create new spaces where ideas and partnerships flourish.

• Adaptable: Adaptable systems learn, improve and adapt by themselves, eliminating the friction that hinders business growth and empowering humans to make better decisions, exponentially faster.

• Radically Human: Radically human systems talk, listen, see and understand just like we do, bringing elegant simplicity to every human-machine interaction and creating tomorrow’s advantage.

“To maximise the return on their technology investments, leading organisations are improving their technology quotient, going beyond building pockets of excellence, to implementing a strategy for achieving enterprise-wide transformation,” added Ghosh.

The Future Systems research found that leaders exhibit a distinct mindset and approach to enterprise-wide technology adoption and organisational transformation - often in stark contrast to Laggards.

Specifically, leaders are:

• Adopting fast, flexible technologies: Leaders are adopting powerful technologies such as AI at a rate of 98% compared to just 42% of Laggards. Leaders are also using solutions that enable decoupled data, infrastructure and applications. In fact, leader adoption of technologies such as DevSecOps, microservices and containers outpaces that of Laggards by a vast margin: 97% to 30%.

• Embracing cloud computing: Leaders are far ahead when it comes to adopting cloud technologies as way to effectively leverage other technologies, including AI and analytics. An overwhelming 95% of leaders see the cloud as a catalyst to innovation, compared to just 30% of Laggards.

• Treating data as a corporate asset: A full 90% of leaders take steps to ensure data quality rather than relying on data that is potentially unverified or biased. This means that 94% of leaders trust that their data is reliable enough to drive business change, compared with just 64% of Laggards.

• Managing technology investments across the enterprise: Leaders are achieving better business alignment by effectively breaking down barriers between IT and other departments.

• Upskilling their talent: Leaders are using experiential learning at nearly three times the rate of Laggards: 73% versus 24%. AI and advanced analytics in areas such as personalised learning, predicting worker skills needs, and matching worker skill requirements with training modules are being used by 87% of leaders, but just 35% of Laggards.

Get access to the report.