Six habits common to digital transformation leaders

There are six practices common to firms leading in their digital transformation efforts, improving their response to disruption and boosting the bottom-line.

That’s according to a new report from professional services firm EY. The report, entitled: "Tech Horizon: Leadership perspectives on technology and transformation”, consists partly of a survey of corporations and startups across countries and in nine sectors: consumer products and retail; education; energy; financial services; health and life sciences; hospitality; industrial; technology, media and entertainment and telecoms; and transportation and logistics.

Those six are:

1. Focusing on customers, first and foremost

2. Accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) to drive growth

3. Driving innovation through ecosystems and partnerships

4. Nurturing talent with new incentives and strategies

5. Activating governance plans for emerging tech

6. Powering innovation by leveraging data and being agile

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In a press release, Dan Higgins, EY Global Advisory Technology Consulting Leader, said: "With so much technology now at the fingertips of business leaders, we wanted to find out if – and how – companies are starting to achieve higher success in their transformations. We hypothesized that we would be able to correlate some common approaches and characteristics to outperformers. As it turned out, while there are many factors impacting companies' top and bottom lines, the research shows that there is a strong link between companies who embrace six core practices and their achievements in improved financial performance."

Other key findings include the fact that, while 44% of “large corporations” deem themselves to have either completed or be well into a programme of digital transformation, 83% of startups have plans to transform in the next two years.

Geographically, European companies were most confident in their digital transformation, with 53% of firms saying they were making good progress compared to 47% in APAC and 35% in the Americas.