A new survey by CA Technologies – Keeping Score: Why Digital Transformation Matters – demonstrates the strong connection between business performance and the technologies and practices that underpin digital transformation, yet reveals a significant opportunity for growth. The global study of senior level business and IT executives study further revealed that deepening adoption of practices such as agile, DevOps, API management and identity-centric security boosts business impact by up to 52 percent.

“The ascendancy of customer experience today is driving technology – specifically software – into the heart of every company’s business model,” said Otto Berkes, CTO at CA Technologies. In his new book – Digitally Remastered: Building Software into Your Business DNA – Berkes notes that, “The road to the future involves the creation of a modern software factory that thrives on an agile and efficient software development process that is constantly translating customer need into delivered experience.”

The research also introduces the Digital Transformation Business Impact Scorecard (BIS), a global ranking of countries and industries across 14 key performance indicators (KPIs) critical for digital transformation success.

The scorecard results clearly indicate that digital transformation is paying off with tangible benefits as respondents reported:

■ 74 percent report improvement in customer experience

■ 76 percent report improvement in digital reach

■ 33 percent increase in speed to market

■ 40 percent increase in customer satisfaction

■ 37 percent increase in new business revenue

Developing Countries Top the List

Against a global average BIS score of 53, many developing countries top the list – India (79), Thailand (71), Brazil (69), Indonesia (66) and Malaysia (64). The US scored 57 and all of the European countries scored lower.

Emerging and developing economies have more ability than mature countries to start their digital transformation efforts with a “clean slate” approach that has less legacy environments to deal with. Therefore, the payoffs can be faster and more significant.

From a vertical sector perspective, the top 5 industries were telecoms (59), banking & financial services (57), public sector (56), retail (54) and healthcare (53). The surprise performance of the public sector reconfirms the strong emphasis governments have been placing on leveraging the app economy and digital transformation to provide more jobs, increase tax revenue and provide better services to their citizens.

The research also explored the key technology choices and best practices businesses are deploying in their digital transformation efforts and what effect they have on business performance. To measure the impact, the research mapped the level of maturity of adoption of these practices against their Business Impact Scorecard results and found:

■ Expanding agile practices beyond development to embrace the entire enterprise boosts digital transformation business performance by 33 percent.

■ Building DevOps practices into the culture of the organization increase performance on the BIS by 35 percent.

■ Applying a more managed, life-cycle approach to APIs increases business impact scores by 52 percent.

■ Deploying identity-centric security which uses context, behavioral analytics and more adaptive and predictive approaches to breach detection boosts digital transformation business performance by 24 percent.

“Clearly, digital transformation is a journey and a common element in process improvement. With the critical role software now plays in helping customers execute their digital strategies, you could be doing well today, but you could be doing even better tomorrow. Becoming more advanced in the adoption of these key enabling technologies and practices should be at the top of every business executive’s agenda,” Berkes concluded.

Kieran Taylor is Senior Principal Product Manager for APM, CA Technologies .