BrandPost: Measuring Your Digital Competitiveness

It’s been a year (and what a year it’s been) since we first shared BMC’s vision for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) , a state where manual efforts are minimized to capitalize on human creativity, skills, and intellect across the enterprise.

Source: BrandPost: Measuring Your Digital Competitiveness

With this vision coming to life over the past year, we wanted to build a way for organizations like yours to be able to measure their digital competitiveness and overall progress on becoming an ADE. BMC’s new ADE Index does just that. It’s based on new global research detailing how far enterprises have come in their ADE journey, where they’re headed next, and how others such as yourself can measure their own digital competitiveness. We partnered with 451 Research (an S&P Global Company) to conduct this research and survey 1,200 business and IT decision makers globally across 20 industries and 11 countries.

Today, the ADE Index stands at 39.3 percent – which means that approximately two-fifths of enterprises are executing on various initiatives in their quest to become an ADE – and this number is forecast to rise to 46.1 percent over the next two years. That’s a 17.3 percent increase, which outpaces various IT spending predictions for the same period.

Our vision of an ADE was based on a five-year runway of business, socioeconomic, and geopolitical-driven changes. Little did we know that a global pandemic would expedite digital transformation efforts across the board. So, what is the data telling us? Ultimately, companies are just scratching the surface of what it means to become an ADE.

When we measure across the operating-model characteristics and five technology tenets that comprise an ADE, Data-Driven Business and Optimized Technology Buying take the top spots – these are no doubt important things when dealing with macro considerations such as the pandemic. But looking ahead two years, the priority refocuses on Adaptive Cybersecurity and Transcendent Customer Experience, both of which we saw as important pre-pandemic enablers.

As the shift to digital continues unabated, it’s still important to understand the human impact on the business. Today, the Central Role of IT, Enterprise DevOps, and Tech-Savvy Corporate Functions rank highly, with the latter remaining consistent over time showing that a persistent effort will need to be made to align people and digital skills to maximize productivity.

One interesting stat that stood out: While the conventional wisdom and most analyst predictions are bullish on automation across the board, the Automation Everywhere tenet ranked lower on the priorities scale for our respondents. We hypothesize that this is because respondents see automation baked into everything moving forward, not as a standalone function – and this is consistent from what we’re hearing from our customers, as well.

With the acceleration of digital transformation efforts, the ADE Index can help provide guidance on where to place your bets and adjust focus to sharpen digital competitiveness on your journey to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Where does your organization stand on its ADE evolution? Find out by reading the full report and measure your own digital competitiveness.

Ram Chakravarti is CTO at BMC Software.