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1 in 4 Businesses Find It Difficult to Keep Up with Digital Developments

Matt Cloke
Endava

For businesses today, the pace of technology can often feel at odds with what’s possible in the real world. In fact, according to a research report by Endava and IDC, exactly one in four businesses still find it difficult to keep pace with developments in digital technology, with a majority (88%) reporting that 50% or less of their digital transformation projects over the last 12 months actually met expected goals and outcomes.


The report Leveraging the Human Advantage for Business Transformation, features insights from over 600 business leaders around the world who are actively navigating digital transformation journeys. It explores the roadblocks, tactics, and outcomes of digital transformation efforts across these businesses, while giving insight into the latest strategies for integrating artificial intelligence and automation technologies.

A key takeaway for business leaders is that dealing with digital change requires more than domain expertise alone. It demands a deep understanding of organizational dynamics, strong relationships with technology partners and a people-centric approach to business. The report data also points to a clear need for human-centricity when investing in digital transformation efforts.

Other key insights from Endava’s Business Transformation report include:

Reduced competitiveness: 62% of organizations reported lower technical maturity and increased time to market (compared to their competitors) as the resulting impacts of failed digital transformation projects.

Wasted investments altogether: With such high failure rates, 59% felt their organization’s investment in digital transformation projects in the last 12 months had been wasted.

Top reasons for stunted success: Limited employee buy-in (39%), conflicting opinions from leadership (36%) and lack of internal collaboration (33%) were cited as key reasons for failure. Organizations often underestimate the criticality of employee buy-in. Effort must be made to enable employees to see the benefits and value of the initiative as they will be tasked with making it work.

Employee experience at risk: 50% of organizations reported that staff attrition has increased when digital transformation projects are unsuccessful. A workforce frustrated with its daily activities will not be motivated to excel when it is critical to do so. If left unaddressed, there is a risk of losing experienced talent that possesses deep knowledge of the business and its customers, which can potentially leave significant gaps in the organization’s capabilities which will be costly in terms of both money and time.

Using tech to upskill humans: 55% of organizations believe that digital transformation investments should be focused on upskilling staff and improving communication.

AI remains strong as a productivity multiplier: One in two organizations globally have deployed or are currently running a proof-of-concept AI project. Intelligence is becoming a primary source of value creation, in which AI is a key accelerator of business change.

Digital transformation initiatives are capable of delivering a positive impact for enterprises; optimized processes, reduced costs, increased revenues and the creation of new revenue streams are the leading outcomes that enterprises are deriving from such investments in digital transformation.

But to reap those rewards, business strategies must evolve in response to changing market dynamics and disruptions, customer demands and technological developments. The era of digital transformation is evolving into the era of the digital business, and enterprises must operate with a digital-first mantra as they seek to create, develop and run entirely digital products and services.

Matt Cloke is Chief Technology Officer at Endava

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1 in 4 Businesses Find It Difficult to Keep Up with Digital Developments

Matt Cloke
Endava

For businesses today, the pace of technology can often feel at odds with what’s possible in the real world. In fact, according to a research report by Endava and IDC, exactly one in four businesses still find it difficult to keep pace with developments in digital technology, with a majority (88%) reporting that 50% or less of their digital transformation projects over the last 12 months actually met expected goals and outcomes.


The report Leveraging the Human Advantage for Business Transformation, features insights from over 600 business leaders around the world who are actively navigating digital transformation journeys. It explores the roadblocks, tactics, and outcomes of digital transformation efforts across these businesses, while giving insight into the latest strategies for integrating artificial intelligence and automation technologies.

A key takeaway for business leaders is that dealing with digital change requires more than domain expertise alone. It demands a deep understanding of organizational dynamics, strong relationships with technology partners and a people-centric approach to business. The report data also points to a clear need for human-centricity when investing in digital transformation efforts.

Other key insights from Endava’s Business Transformation report include:

Reduced competitiveness: 62% of organizations reported lower technical maturity and increased time to market (compared to their competitors) as the resulting impacts of failed digital transformation projects.

Wasted investments altogether: With such high failure rates, 59% felt their organization’s investment in digital transformation projects in the last 12 months had been wasted.

Top reasons for stunted success: Limited employee buy-in (39%), conflicting opinions from leadership (36%) and lack of internal collaboration (33%) were cited as key reasons for failure. Organizations often underestimate the criticality of employee buy-in. Effort must be made to enable employees to see the benefits and value of the initiative as they will be tasked with making it work.

Employee experience at risk: 50% of organizations reported that staff attrition has increased when digital transformation projects are unsuccessful. A workforce frustrated with its daily activities will not be motivated to excel when it is critical to do so. If left unaddressed, there is a risk of losing experienced talent that possesses deep knowledge of the business and its customers, which can potentially leave significant gaps in the organization’s capabilities which will be costly in terms of both money and time.

Using tech to upskill humans: 55% of organizations believe that digital transformation investments should be focused on upskilling staff and improving communication.

AI remains strong as a productivity multiplier: One in two organizations globally have deployed or are currently running a proof-of-concept AI project. Intelligence is becoming a primary source of value creation, in which AI is a key accelerator of business change.

Digital transformation initiatives are capable of delivering a positive impact for enterprises; optimized processes, reduced costs, increased revenues and the creation of new revenue streams are the leading outcomes that enterprises are deriving from such investments in digital transformation.

But to reap those rewards, business strategies must evolve in response to changing market dynamics and disruptions, customer demands and technological developments. The era of digital transformation is evolving into the era of the digital business, and enterprises must operate with a digital-first mantra as they seek to create, develop and run entirely digital products and services.

Matt Cloke is Chief Technology Officer at Endava

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...