Techaisle Blog

Midmarket firms that adopt a holistic organization-wide digital transformation strategy are growing at 2.2X vs. Siloed digital transformation strategy. They are also experiencing 2.1X business process cost reduction, 1.9X better customer intimacy and 1.4X improved employee productivity vs. Siloed adopters. Techaisle’s US midmarket digital transformation trends study shows that it pays to have an organization-wide, holistic digital transformation strategy. Survey of 876 US midmarket firms reveals that Holistic adopters are experiencing better business outcomes than Siloed adopters of digital transformation.

We are all responsible for the pace of change – and to ensuring that it benefits rather than threatens our success. Nowhere is this clearer than with digital transformation – the adoption of digital infrastructure as the foundation for digital business processes, which enhance operational efficiency, employee empowerment, product innovation, customer intimacy, competitiveness and profitability throughout the organization. Businesses that embrace digitalization are more agile, more adept at using technology to accelerate cycle time and expand reach, better able to respond to market opportunities and requirements – while those that are left behind face an uncertain future in which one wrong step can lead to diminished business viability.

Operational efficiency, employee empowerment, customer intimacy and product innovation form the four pillars of digital transformation within US midmarket (100-999 employees) firms. Techaisle’s unique study, US Midmarket Digital Transformation Trends, provides readers with statistically-significant and current data on digital transformation. A sample of 876, outstanding for a single country, midmarket-specific research initiative, considered accurate at a 95% confidence level (19 times of 20) at a margin of error of +/- 3.3%. The study reveals details about the four foundational pillars of digital transformation along with drivers, motivations, challenges, inhibitors, and business outcomes.

The first step in understanding the potential of a technology trend is identifying the extent to which technology aligns with or supports executive ‘care-abouts’: technologies that connect directly to C-level objectives are most likely to obtain corporate support. Taken together, the size/robustness of the data makes it the most reliable source of information on digitalization adoption in the US midmarket (100-999 employees).

Techaisle recently analyzed 1,116 survey responses that provide insights needed to build and execute on analytics strategies for targeting the small and midmarket customer segments.

SMBs are prioritizing a wide range of improved outcomes within their businesses: improvement within existing operations and processes, expansion of the customer base, profitability, creation and accelerated delivery of new offerings, reduced cost, and enhanced ability to manage the unknown. Remarkably, each of the top SMB business issues can be addressed with analytics solutions – and indeed, SMBs are using analytics to address each today. Overall, SMB analytics investments are being driven primarily by productivity and process improvements with the top two reasons for SMB investments in analytics solutions as increased productivity and improved processes.

Regardless of the business issue, analytics provides an answer. And SMB analytics begins with cloud. More than 50% of both small and midmarket businesses consider cloud to be an essential analytics technology.

Techaisle survey shows that a strong link between analytics, Big Data and IoT. The connection between IoT solutions supporting process analysis and analytics and Big Data is not lost on the SMBs included in the Techaisle SMB and midmarket IoT Adoption survey. Findings from the research reveal that there are strong links between analytics/Big Data use and intentions and IoT use and intentions and sophisticated SMB use explicitly ties these two together.

Consider the data presented in the figure below. The top left quadrant of the tables shows the proportion of current analytics and Big Data users who have also deployed IoT; at 37% and 47% respectively. There is evidence that current users of analytics and Big Data are the lead adopters of IoT, a finding that is further supported by the fact that 53% of current analytics users and 45% of Big Data users are planning to use IoT in the near term, which will bring the proportion of analytics/Big Data users who are also deploying IoT to about 90%.