Telcos lead in digital transformation, though that’s not saying much

ITEM: A new digital maturity index from analyst firm Ovum found that the telecoms and banking sectors are most mature in the drive for digital transformation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that overall transformation progress has been slow even in those sectors, and less than 10% of enterprises have achieved their digital transformation goals. 

Ovum’s latest ICT Enterprise Insights program asked senior ICT executives in 14 industries to rate their organizations against nine steps identified by Ovum as key to digital transformation, including cybersecurity, digital skills, organizational structure and culture, digitizing processes, creating digital services and actually having a clearly articulated digital strategy. The results were aggregated into a digital maturity index.

The telecoms sector rated highest on the index – but with a score of 43.9%, indicating that many providers are still in the early stages – or at best or mid-stream levels – in their digital transformation journey.

In fact, Ovum says, of all the 6,300+ enterprises surveyed globally, only 8% reckon they have achieved full transformation. A little over 16% said they are well-advanced, while 23% rate themselves as still in the early stages.

The banking sector was a close second at 42%. Government was dead last at 37.3%.

Techie details below the infographic.

The program also examined the role of digital technologies enabling that path to digital transformation, including big data, blockchain, IoT, platform architecture/APIs, artificial intelligence and microservices.

Results: big data and API-based architectures are seeing the most adoption, with close to 40% of enterprises actively trialing or deploying these technologies – almost 50% plan or are considering to do so in the future. Microservices and IoT are not quite as advanced in terms of active deployment, but over 50% of enterprises are making plans for them.

Meanwhile, activity around AI and blockchain is mostly talk and little action in terms of how they figure into digital transformation strategies – which is not surprising as they’re relatively new technologies currently enjoying no small amount of hype. Enterprises are looking, but it will take time for them to sort out the hype from the reality and determine what exactly these technologies can contribute to their transformation plans.