The days when the company IT department controlled digital spending are over. According to PwC’s 7th annual Digital IQ Report, 68 percent of digital spending by business comes from budgets outside of IT. That’s a rapid evolution from just one year ago, when IT still controlled the majority of digital spending.
The report, released this week, draws on responses from 2,000 executives in 51 countries to a survey designed to assess how well companies understand the value of technology. Questions aimed to discover how effectively companies implement digital technologies, and which digital behaviors have led to improved financial performance.
The report identified 10 behaviors that drive digital performance. PwC said that companies responding to the Digital IQ survey with the highest scores across those 10 are 50 percent more likely to achieve rapid revenue growth and twice as likely to achieve rapid profit growth when compared to the remaining Digital IQ respondents. The behaviors are:
- CEO is a champion for digital
- Executives responsible for digital are involved in high level strategy setting
- Business-aligned digital strategy is agreed upon and shared at the C-level
- Business and digital strategy are well-communicated enterprise wide
- Digital enterprise investments are made primarily for competitive advantage
- Leaders engage with external sources to gather new ideas for applying emerging technologies
- Company effectively utilizes all the data it captures to drive business value
- Leaders evaluate and plan for security and privacy risks in digital enterprise projects
- A multi-year digital enterprise roadmap includes business capabilities and processes as well as digital and IT components
- Company consistently measures outcomes from digital technology investments
PwC also found that Chief Information Officers now control less than half of internal and external digital efforts, and their control is expected to drop off to just 35 percent of digital efforts and to be limited to internal IT efforts by 2018.
Nearly one-third of global respondents said they are investing more than 15 percent of revenue into digital technologies. The hoped-for results? Immediate returns rather than long term disruption. Nearly half said they hope the technologies will help grow revenue, and one-fourth expect to create better customer experiences through digital. Only 12 percent expect digital investments to bring an increase profits.
Download the full report at the PwC website.
Follow Adrienne Burke @adajane
