TALKING BUSINESS
“87% said
the CIO
role is more
challenging
than ever.”
W
e can all see it with our own
eyes but now it’s official –
the UAE is ready for change.
KPMG’s 2017 Change Readiness Index
(CRI) ranked the UAE third globally
(from the 136 countries ranked) across
three capabilities – government (rank
two), enterprise (one) and people and
civil society (17).
Within the enterprise sector, the UAE
ranked one for infrastructure, two for
technology infrastructure, and three for
innovation and R&D.
This is an outstanding recognition but
we see the evidence all around us as
Dubai rapidly transforms into the world’s
smartest city (by a factor of 10x).
Enterprises must keep pace – and they
know it; this doesn’t mean incremental
change but rapid and radical change.
We see this within the CIO community
members of our own Middle East
Customer User Group, which comprises
CIOs representing large enterprises
operating across the region.
Survival of the quickest
According to the findings of
SAP’s recent (July 2017) Digital
Transformation Executive Study
(supported by Oxford Economics), 84%
of global companies agree that digital
transformation is critical to their survival
(survival - not growth and development)
in the next five years – but only 3%
have completed company-wide
transformation efforts.
Talk is obviously cheap but inertia is a
concern, especially when you consider
that digital transformation was cited
as a top-three driver of future revenue
across all industries and all types and
sizes of companies. The benefits of
digital transformation are becoming
apparent – the study says that Digital
Leaders already enjoy higher market
share and profits and expect to see
strong revenue growth, as ROI on their
digital transformation commitments
and investments.
But who leads the digital transformation
process and how do you organise to
www.intelligentcio.com
Luc Serviant, Vice President,
Middle East and Africa,
Orange Business Services
“The CIO is
pivotal to the
transformation
process and
they face an
increasingly
complex task.”
deliver a fundamental and complex
change management process across
an entire organisation? Where does
it start and end, how does it start
and how is it managed? How do you
know it’s working? What technologies
do you adopt to enable this digital
transformation and how do you
integrate these effectively?
There are some clues in the SAP study;
digital leaders see digital transformation
as truly transformational; they focus on
customer-facing functions first; they focus
on talent (it’s all about people); and they
invest in next generation technologies.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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