Article by Infosys associate vice president and head of cloud, infrastructure, and security Vikas Tatwani.
The pandemic has an upside down all kinds of prejudices – and the business world is far from immune.
One such bias involved the “digital ceiling” that supposedly separated the largest and most successful companies from all the smaller ones toiling beneath it in recent years.
Technology maturity, as it used to be thought, is one of the things that sets the best apart from the rest. To be an elite company in this day and age, you need privileged digital assets and infrastructure.
But according to recent research from Infosys, this kind of thinking may be a little outdated. There has been a shift from the “digital ceiling” to the “digital floor”. It turns out that organizations can take small steps with incremental investments and standard digital practices to get started and compete with industry leaders. If they don’t build such a floor, they will eventually sink – or worse, go into free fall.
Cloud computing represents one part of this floor, legacy modernization the other. Of the 2,700 business leaders who participated in Infosys’ recent “Digital Radar” study, more than 99% had already finished laying their floors – or at least laid a solid foundation.
Once this foundation is in place, businesses can move to the next level and start using the foundation to build new capabilities and offerings quickly. After all, good companies never stop producing — they constantly evaluate their modernization efforts and cloud strategies.
However, companies are trying to use technology to deliver something different. Specifically, they want it to aid innovation, provide better customer service and detect new insights from the petabytes of data they have at hand, Digital Radar found.
This trend is reflected in some emerging technologies that seem to occupy more and more businesses. Digital Radar 2022 asked companies about their strategic issues and 19 leading technology initiatives to adopt. This trend was true for all industries, which starkly contrasts the state of affairs three years ago. In 2019, Digital Radar showed that retail companies started pursuing tech initiatives 81% of the time, far more than the 59% underway in healthcare facilities. Those startup rates have risen to 97% for retailers and 98% for healthcare companies.
Approximately 79% of respondents have implemented APIs and microservices in at least one business unit. Cybersecurity ranks second with 78 percent, followed by the Internet of Things with 77 percent.
A company’s digital efforts must constantly evolve to engage staff and customers in immersive experiences. But the more companies build from their digital floors, the more it pays to keep a listening ear. That’s because, when companies operate in uncertain times, they can easily lose sight of the people such technology should serve completely.
