Telecom, Banking Lead Digital Transformation Among Verticals

Written by Edward Gately
November 29, 2017

Only 8 percent of Ovum survey respondents consider themselves to have achieved digital transformation.

Telecom and banking are the furthest along among 14 industries when it comes to the drive for digital transformation.

That’s according to Ovum’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Enterprise Insights program, an annual IT decision-maker survey that includes more than 6,300 enterprises across 63 countries, 80 technologies and 14 industries.

“IT vendors and service providers that deliver the solutions that enable digital transformation can leverage Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights to identify the market segments with the most opportunity – by country, industry or size of company,” said Daniel Mayo, Ovum’s director of IT data tools and insights. “Along with prioritizing market segments, the survey is an essential input in product planning, market messaging and salesforce deployment.”

ICT executives were asked to rate their organizations against nine steps identified by Ovum as key to digital transformation. These ranged from tackling cybersecurity to developing digital skills, creating the necessary organizational structure and culture, digitizing processes, creating digital services and having a clearly articulated digital strategy.

While the telecom sector was most advanced, the overall level of digital maturity is low, with its index score currently at 43.9 percent, and banking next at 42 percent. Many providers in both sectors still are in the early or middle stages of transformation.

Across the enterprises surveyed, only 8 percent consider themselves to have achieved transformation, and a little more than 16 percent believe they are well-advanced. Almost as many (23 percent) rate themselves to be still at the early stages, according to the survey.

Enterprises are most advanced in adoption of big data and API-based architectures, with nearly two in five (40 percent) actively trialing or deploying these areas, and another 50 percent are planning or considering to do so in the future. Microservices and the Internet of Things (IoT) are less advanced in terms of active deployment, but more than half are planning or considering to do so in the future. In contrast, while artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are much discussed, actual traction by enterprises to use those technologies for digital transformation is much less, according to the survey.