The lead by the telecom sector has been revealed in a recent Ovum survey, which has looked into which types sectors are making the most progress in digital transformation. Other factors considered are use of big data and application programming interfaces. Second to telecoms comes the financial sector. In third and forth place comes utilities and education.
According to the Ovum survey less than ten percent of companies surveyed believe that their digital transformation journeys are complete, based on a maturity rating telecom firms come out on top. The areas assessed for the survey included: support for a digital led organizational culture; creating new digital products and services; having a digital workplace strategy and digitizing back-office functions.
A defined digital strategy
Other measures used to derive at the sector-by-sector ratings were: being able to articulate and publish a digital strategy; making use of data across the business and having a proactive approach to cyber security. By assessing these measures telecoms came top with a 43.9 percent rating; banking came next at 42 percent.
The types of activities that telecom companies have been engaging in to achieve the top rang are using robust consumer analytics; undertaking the digitization of order management; adopting customer self service portals; implementing simplified IT interfaces; and championing business automation.
Ovum is an independent analyst and consultancy firm located in London, U.K. The company specializes in global coverage of information technology and telecommunications industries. The survey was based on based on primary interviews with over 6,300 enterprises globally. These enterprises were located in 63 countries across 14 industries.
IoT progress is slower
Interestingly all sectors scored weakest on the adoption of microservices and the Internet of Things (IoT). These were less advanced in terms of active deployment. Nevertheless. there is some change taking place here, as Digital Journal has discussed in the article “How the Internet of Things is starting to disrupt telecoms.”
Commenting on the survey, Daniel Mayo, Director of IT Data Tools & Insights at Ovum said: “IT vendors and service providers that deliver the solutions that enable digital transformation can leverage Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights to identify the market segments with the most opportunity – by country, industry, or size of company.”
He adds: ” Along with prioritizing market segments, the survey is an essential input in product planning, market messaging, and sales force deployment.”
Telecoms: $23 trillion by 2025
These factors are important for telecom companies to adopt in order to remain competitive, especially in light of the global digital transformation market being estimated to reach $23 trillion by 2025. This lucrative market also offers promise for new entrants, as set-out in the Digital Journal article “Telecom startups investing in AI.”
