I recently attended a Gartner webinar titled: CEO Concerns 2014: Business Gets Digital. It was a very interesting and insightful into how organizations’ investments across the company have evolved and how those strategies relate the latest Digital trends. To set the stage, the survey recipients (2013) were between 391 and 410 CEOs and senior executives globally, depending on the specific survey.
The first survey discusses how organizations are changing with respect to the new leadership roles companies are adding to their team. The results reflect what we have all been hearing in the marketplace, 17% created a Chief Data Officer to focus on information assets and the second is the Chief Digital Officer to focus on customer interaction. This makes sense with what we saw at the CGSM Summit last week with technology and marketing, or in this case a “digital” title, are working closer together to create a customer centric strategy.
Another important observation was 64% of the CEOs had growth as a top three business priority for 2014-2015 and 22% included technology in their top three priorities. What makes these interesting metrics is the chart below which reflects how CEOs are changing to a technology enabled view on growth in the past three years. As you will see, IT and Digital capabilities are at the top. This plays well with Perficient’s Consumer Markets go-to-market strategy where many of our solutions are digital related. This reflects a great opportunity for us to capitalize on these investment changes of the executives we are targeting.
To dive a bit deeper into the types of technology investments CEOs are focusing on in the next five years, take a look at the chart below. The top four are right in our sweet spot. Very exciting news for our Consumer Markets practice and Perficient as a whole.
With Digital Marketing being at the top of the list, Gartner went one step further to understand what that meant to these executives so they asked: “What do you mean when you think about ‘digital business’ in the context of your business & industry?” The answers were all over the board from the laggers: “General use of IT, computers” and “Paperless information flow” to the E-business mindset of “Online customer self-service” and “B2B collaboration”. Then there were the more leading types of responses including “Cloud computing” and “Big data” to the executives that have a deeper understanding, “Multi-channel” and “Competitive advantage”. This emphasizes the importance for us to first understand how the executives we are talking to define “digital” and what it means to them in terms of company growth.
The Gartner speakers go on to quote several CEOs from large global organizations such as Starbucks, Burberry, WPP and P&G all agreeing that some form of digital is at the top of their investment list. Taking that a step further are manufacturer companies (GE, Nestle, Blu, Renault and Nissan,Under Armour) who are incorporating digital technologies within their actual products (ie. sensors that notify the manufacturer that a coffee maker needs maintenance for pro-active support, electronic cigarettes, autonomous driving or digital fibers in sportswear that provides feedback on heart rate).
Finally, Gartner concludes the webinar with some key guidelines for CEOs and senior executives which positions us to be able to leverage our strengths to support their needs and priorities for the upcoming years!
For more information on Perficient’s expertise, please visit our Consumer Products and Retail sites!
Image Sources:
http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=2730621&ref=Webinar-Calenda
Business Gets Digital!
by Barbara Ferrara on June 26th, 2014 | ~ minute read
