Photo by Inkong Boutchalern
Bridging the gap between IT capabilities and business goals.
Digital IQ is important in business. In essence, businesses that prioritize integrated workflows, and predictive data analytics achieve stronger financial results than those companies that don’t.
This is possible as a result of four factors:
1. Unifying by consolidating systems into a central operating platform that eliminates manual data entry.
2. Managing cash flow by forecasting revenue with artificial intelligence and predictive modeling.
3. Using robotic process automation to spare your team for more important functions.
4. For stronger profits, accelerate delivery with cross-functional engineering and public cloud adoption.
These strategies resulted after important research of a global survey of 2,000 executives by PwC. The report was entitled, the 2015 Digital IQTM Survey.
“Everyone talks about digital, but few understand the specific leadership behaviors that drive performance,” said Chris Curran, PwC advisory principal and chief technologist.
“We are seeing signs this is changing, with leading digital practitioners looking to how today’s investments can improve tomorrow’s business results. This is a critical mindset, especially as digital technologies become more pervasive,” adds the consultant.
Ninety-nine percent of the ambitious companies anticipated immediate returns on their investments. The remaining 1 percent wanted to disrupt their own or other industries. However, the companies have been under pressure internally because of changing tech spending patterns and digital roles.
Even though CEO enthusiasm for digital investments has been quite high, the report also said 73 percent must hasten their investment approaches to dominate their marketplaces and prevent internal disruption. PwC interviews were equally divided among business and IT executives.
Increasingly, companies have been investing in technology to drive immediate business value. Forty-five percent of respondents expected growth in revenue. Twenty-five percent wanted improved customer experiences and 12 percent want stronger profits.
The PwC report stated businesses were 50 percent more likely to enjoy rapid revenue increases and twice as likely to do so, if they used 10 strategies.
PwC’s 10 strategies:
- The CEO is a champion for digital.
Seventy-three percent of business and IT executives said that their CEO was a champion for digital, a significant increase over the fifty-seven percent who said they had a CEO champion in 2013.
- The executives responsible for digital are involved in setting high-level business strategy.
CEOs may set the tone and vision for digital, but those responsible for operationalizing digital, often the CIO or CDO, are instrumental in setting high-level business strategy. This is especially true in companies where digital leaders have their own P&Ls and are responsible for a significant share of the business.
- Business-aligned digital strategy is agreed upon and shared at the C-level.
Organizations and leaders that are aligned are more likely to maximize investments and can better identify areas of overlap and resource gaps that could derail efforts.
- Business and digital strategy are well communicated enterprise-wide.
Strategy isn’t complete without engagement by everyone in the organization. Some 69 percent of companies said that business and digital strategy were shared enterprise-wide.
- Active engagement with external sources to gather new ideas for applying emerging technologies.
Top-performing companies found digital inspiration everywhere, especially outside their organization. Innovative companies were much more likely to evaluate many emerging technologies, characterizing their approach to adoption as one that’s purely technology driven (69 percent), in contrast to the rest of companies (54 percent).
They also looked to a wide variety of sources to seed their idea pipeline, actively engaging with industry analysts (63 percent), customers (46 percent), and vendor ecosystems (44 percent) the most.
- Digital enterprise investments were made primarily for competitive advantage.
An indicator of evolving roles, 68 percent of digital spending came from budgets outside of IT’s budget. Also, the executive responsible for digital investment continued to shift, with the CIO (27 percent) and the CDO (14 percent) sharing that job with the CEO (34 percent) and CFO (13 percent).
- Effective utilization of all data captured to drive business value.
Getting value out of data often meant using it to guide strategic decisions like how to grow the business or whether to collaborate with competitors. This remained a challenge for executives, citing specifically behavioral and skills barriers, such as understanding which data to use and how it benefits their role, nearly as much as issues with data quality or accuracy.
- Proactive evaluation and planning for security and privacy risks in digital enterprise projects.
As companies have been adding new technologies, customers, partners, devices, and data, there are ever more interdependencies and risks to address. That’s the baseline today.
What’s different when it comes to Digital IQ has been the level of proactivity required. Businesses needed to consistently think about how their cybersecurity strategies can help build brand, competitive advantage, and shareholder value.
- A single, multi-year digital enterprise roadmap that includes business capabilities and processes as well as digital and IT components.
Progress has ebbed and flowed as digital has become more pervasive in the enterprise while at the same time also more fragmented.
- Consistent measurement of outcomes from digital technology investments.
Consistency in measurement is also crucial. Businesses and their boards have wanted to see the value they’re achieving from digital investments.
Top-performing companies led lower performing ones here again (79 percent vs. 72 percent). Demonstrating this required a combination of traditional metrics (like ROI) to track against growth goals, as well as newer ones for measuring more disruptive investments.
Finally, a firm, deel.com, is offering a complimentary report, “IT Strategy Toolkit: 2026 Guide for IT and HR Leaders.”
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related strategies:
Best Practices for CFOs to Stay Current in Technology — Just as every professional knows, CFOs also find it increasingly challenging to stay up-to-date on technology. Up-to-date technology means CFOs can better do their jobs. Here’s how.
Skyrocketing Cybercrime Calls for 8 Strategies to Manage 3rd Party Risks — Daily data breaches have become the norm in news headlines. We’re also hearing a lot about third-party risks being a chief culprit in cybercrime. Your business associates might be bigger risks for data breaches than you realize, too. Here’s why and what you can do.
Strategies for CEOs to Win Their Cyber Security Tug of War — The cyber security tug of war is never ending even though chief executive officers and board members now get the importance of protecting their companies’ information assets. They’ve learned to fear cyber-security threats because they could lose their jobs. If this is all true, why then are there incessant, worldwide cyber attacks?
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
-B. F. Skinner
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