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News about data breaches – when enterprises ‘share’ their data without consent – make headlines and strike fear into executives’ hearts, send IT departments into overdrive and shake customer and employee confidence. However, little is said about when enterprises share data purposefully. There is a strong case to be made about how sharing data can make you and your ecosystem partners stronger, more resilient to volatility and uncertainty, and better able to serve your customers.

Did you know that 50% of US and Canadian of enterprises are already sourcing data from their partners (suppliers, distributors, retailers, etc.) and an additional 19% say that they are likely to begin doing so in the near future? (See material from IDC’s March 2022 Data Buyers Study) This means that it is highly likely that your competition is doing this. It is not just that so many others are doing this, it is that there can be a lot of benefit to sharing with trusted partners.

Shared data and insight is one of the foundations of successful industry ecosystems. IDC’s most recent global research finds that more than 1/3 of enterprises find that shared data positively impacts KPIs for innovation rates, business agility, and transforming their individual enterprise to more digital operation (IDC’s Future of Industry Ecosystem Survey, June 2022). This type of sharing is widespread and can take many forms. There are obvious opportunities for suppliers to share data with the companies that make finished goods, for example. When the finished goods company has accurate information about supplies and transit times for inputs to their products, they can foresee potential out of stock situations. This can allow them to qualify additional suppliers and/or inform their customers of potential bottlenecks. Sourcing and sharing data outside the individual enterprise helps provide insight that one entity cannot effectively collect and analyze on its own.

Of course, after you answer, ‘Why share data and insight?’ you have to figure out, ‘How?’ IDC has been looking at this through a series of research, starting with The Why and the How of Shared Data in Industry Ecosystems where we describe ways to create value from data and insights through fit-for-purpose solutions such as data marketplaces. Next, we followed that up with case studies of how groups have made this work in a presentation on Shared Industry Ecosystem Data: How Ecosystems Made It Work with Data Sharing and Marketplace Technology. In this research, you can learn the types of technologies that others have used to make data and insight sharing more available. These tools also assist with curation, governance and entitlement – which are key to any shared data situation.

Many enterprises still struggle with the ability to share data and insight across divisions and geographies. However, you don’t have to wait until you get all of your internal information sharing perfect before you look to how outside collaboration might provide advantages. Wins with external stakeholders could pave the way for more effective collaboration internally!

Data sharing has existed since before there were technologies in place. Vendors and customers have often had dialog where they shared information, whether these arrangements were formal or informal. Most often, solving the technical side of data sharing meets with less skepticism than the governance, change management and pure inertia issues. The gap has been less that potential ecosystem participants are unable to share and more that they have been unwilling for one reason or another. IDC receives a lot of inquiries about topics such as:

• What if there’s no industry ecosystem for me?
• How do I know what to share?
• How am I going to share this?
• Do I have to share everything?
• How do I get others to share with me?
• Should I charge for access to my data?
• Can we make money doing this?

Your enterprise is not alone in wanting to learn more but being cautious about the potential exposure of shared data and insights. And, even though a few ecosystems have been able to create an outside revenue stream for these outputs, it should not be a primary consideration when potential partners come together.

Reach out and let’s talk about how to make shared data and insight in industry ecosystems work for you! There a quite a few examples we can point to, across industries and across the globe. You can learn from other ecosystems and how they’ve used technology, process and teams to derive mutual benefit.

Next on our research agenda, we are crafting a TechBrief on Data Clean Rooms – a way to share data while preserving privacy and competitive information, while benefiting the two or more parties who are looking to tackle common challenges ranging from fighting fraud to improving supply chain issues to helping to gain more insight about customers and potential customers. This is a way to be building your own ecosystem and gaining valuable insight while keeping the legal and security teams satisfied with the level of care you put in place.

We will continue to write about the topic of shared data & insights within our Future of Industry Ecosystems practice as well as our Data as a Service practice.

To discover more strategies CIOs will need in order to plan for contingencies and technologies, to create a dependable infrastructure that enables fault tolerance, read IDC’s new eBook, CIO Sentiment Survey: Finding the North Star in a Turbulent Environment.

The adage “the only constant is change” is truer than ever in today’s disrupted world – a world where the velocity, intensity, and frequency of change continues to push us to new heights, compelling IT to change itself and revisit how CIOs must lead this transformation.

The IDC CIO Sentiment Survey 2022 was conducted in July 2022 (with 289 worldwide respondents) and revealed the extent to which digital business is accelerating and the global IT landscape transforming. The survey found that many CIOs face vital challenges in achieving their goals in these turbulent times. The good news is that many organizations are responding to these changes with agility, creativity, and innovation. But how are they doing it? How did they move from being reactive to proactive? What are some of the best practices for survival and success?

Why Does IT Matter?

The percentage of business coming from digital products, services, channels, or digitally driven improvement to operations has reached 50% of total business in 2022 and is similar in each region of the world — demonstrating that digital business is a rising global phenomenon.

Today, IT teams compete globally for talent and can expect a comparable impact on their organization’s business. On average, each full-time IT employee supports $13.29 million in revenue — a data point that is relatively consistent worldwide, with $14.70 million in North America; $13.96 million in Europe, Mideast, and Africa; and $12.39 million in Asia-Pacific. 

It’s not just the revenue generated per IT employee — it’s about how they add value to product or service offerings by enabling digital business, improving customer experience, or making internal operations more efficient. IT is clearly the core engine for the success of a digital business.

But beware of your perceptions. Our survey found that most CIOs overestimate their performance and how much others appreciate them. For example, when looking at their business process performance, 77% of IT executives estimate their overall performance as somewhat better or much better than the competition. This is significantly above the normal 50% average and highlights a clear, statistically demonstratable overestimation of performance.

But responsibilities are increasing. Fifty-five percent of CIOs apply influence they gained during the pandemic to expand their role by adding new responsibilities in areas such as intelligence, privacy, innovation, transformation, safety, sustainability, or resilience.

A minority of CIOs have established a stronger relationship with their CEO (16%) or have gained recognition as a business leader (18%). As the digital revolution accelerates further intertwining of business and IT, rising to a business leader is the only path forward for most CIOs.

Making IT Count

CIOs have constantly sought to deliver the largest and most numerous contributions from IT activities but, more than ever, they must now choose their battles and focus their efforts on helping the business deliver differentiated business outcomes.

The IT group’s most important business impacts across the organization are enabling it to respond more quickly to change (cited by 85% of respondents) and taking the business online, virtual, and contactless (84%). To do this, the IT organization must apply that differentiated approach in the current context of uncertainty and volatility:

• Survey respondents think that Agile portfolio management brings the most impactful business outcomes (45% of respondents).
• Value stream mapping remains a highly effective approach (35%) as it helps identify where customer value is added and where it’s consumed.
• CIOs need to focus on simplification of  business processes with increased self-service options (44%) and set an automation-first initiative aiming to improve all business-critical systems (35%).

Be Practical

For Future CIOs, navigating the winds of change requires a new approach — no longer is more and faster a viable approach. Now, a focus on high-impact initiatives with discerning business outcomes is the key:

• Get closer to customers. IT executives stay as far as they can away from customers, partners, LOB executives, or the CMO, spending less than 12% of their interactions with any of these stakeholders. They spend far more of their time with the IT leadership team (43%), the CTO (42%), and the CEO (35%).
• Automate. On average, 40% of business processes have been automated, with IT being the most automated (42%). However, IT executives estimate that finance and supply chain will take over in the next three years (43% and 42%, respectively).
• Care for people. Retaining talent has always been a hallmark of strong leaders; now it is a differentiating leadership trait crucial to the success of an IT organization. And the best way to boost motivation and retention is by providing more opportunities to work with and learn from the business (cited by 29% of respondents). While still valued, salary and bonus incentives seem to have a lower impact (24%).

Conclusion

IDC’s CIO Sentiment Survey 2022 has disproven the old age, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Digital business has demonstrably become a worldwide phenomenon with opportunities and inevitable challenges, for customers, employees, and organization leaders — but none more so than CIOs. To discover more strategies CIOs need to plan for contingencies and technologies to create a dependable infrastructure that enables fault tolerance, read IDC’s new eBook, CIO Sentiment Survey: Finding the North Star in a Turbulent Environment. Click the button below to download the eBook now.

Learn more about the Fourth Agricultural Revolution (Agriculture 4.0) and technologies supporting food quality and production efficiency, read IDC’s new, complimentary eBook, The Digital Agriculture Revolution: A Survival Guide.

Predictions Previously Estimated Agriculture Could Only Support 5 Billion People

The 1973 movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and Leigh Taylor-Leigh, describes a future where uncontrolled population growth, ecological disaster and climate change have caused agriculture to collapse, turning the Earth into a dystopian landscape. In this future, food riots are a common occurrence throughout the world, and the main source of food is a wafer made of plankton called Soylent Green, which in the end turns out to be made from recycled humans. The population of that dystopian world was set at a hyperinflated, unthinkable 7 billion people.

Soylent Green is set in 2022.

If you read science fiction from before 1970 that mentions world population, it will usually cap the populace of Earth at about 5 billion people. At that point the Earth either resorts to draconian population control, cannibalism, or extra-planetary colonization. Currently, our population is estimated at 7.96 billion people. Cannibalism is still frowned upon in polite company and despite the best efforts of billionaire playboys, our current extra-planetary population sits at around zero people. Why were these predictions so far off?

The Third Agricultural Revolution, also known as the Green Revolution, started in the 1950s. It saw the development of technologies including mechanization, chemistry, and breeding techniques that dramatically increased food production. The Green Revolution has contributed to the reduction of poverty, prevented hunger for billions, eradicated widespread famine, reduced GHG emissions, and tripled yield per acre, thus leaving more land for natural habitats and averting ecological disaster. This revolution silently changed the world in ways that were unimaginable even in the 1970s, 20 years into the Green Revolution.

In 2022, we are facing similar predictions. Food production must increase by 60% in 30 years. We are facing a future defined by climate change, ecological collapse, and worldwide famine. The insatiable modern diet for food and energy is consuming the planet, leaving nothing for the next generation. Some predictions claim that we only have 30 harvests left before agriculture collapses.

What many are unaware of (or deliberately ignorant of) is that we are solidly into the Fourth Agriculture Revolution.

We are on the cusp of a much brighter future

The Fourth Agricultural Revolution (Agriculture 4.0) is the incorporation of IoT, automation, data collection and data analysis into food production systems at scale. Agriculture 4.0 is enabling food producers to do more with less and create new digital commodities which are revolutionizing the way we produce and distribute food. As the world becomes more affluent, markets will demand more diverse foods, higher protein, increased quality, and environmentally sustainable foods at an affordable price. Data is the key to meeting these demands. Technologies to collect and use data are being incorporated at every level of food production. The Fourth Agriculture Revolution will be the collection, movement, processing, packaging, and marketing of data at scale.

What does that mean? Better, cheaper, and environmentally friendly foods.

Waste Not, Want Not

An excellent example of the power of tech is the reduction of food waste. Roughly 33% of the food produced in the world is wasted either along the supply chain or in the home. In the US, estimates suggest that enough to feed the population of Italy (67 million ton) is wasted at the retail and consumer level alone. The use of IoT, data technologies and data analysis is already reducing spoilage in storage and transport, helping match the right crops to the right processors, lengthen shelf life or shorten supply chains to connect farmers to consumers. The enormous potential to build a better world (and make a bit of money) has agriculture and technology companies hungry to work together.

Let’s Clear the Air

Agriculture contributes up to 25% of GHG emission worldwide, but the industry could become carbon negative in the next decade. Widespread adoption of practices that encourage soil carbon sequestration could remove up to 5 Gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, turning agriculture into one of the best mechanisms to fight climate change. Agtech is rapidly reducing GHG emissions by creating emission benchmarks, improving production practices, and creating digital commodities that put a price on environmental services. These environmental service markets provide incentives speeding research, development, and adoption of environmentally beneficial technologies.

Robots and Their Vision of the Future

Autonomous machinery has the potential to revolutionize agriculture. Swarm farming, in which multiple autonomous machines work in concert, will allow for farming to be highly efficient, with timely seeding, automated crop scouting, judicious crop protection applications, and quicker harvests. Better timing of processes will increase yield and crop quality. Simply reducing soil compaction from heavy machines could raise yields by 10%. Automation will also allow for smaller, more agile equipment, while automating processes will also allow producers to focus on higher order tasks and promote more diverse cropping systems. These machines will be able to gather a wealth of information which can be used to refine best practices, improve predictive models, and provide actionable insights.

Computer vision (CV) has been gaining momentum in agriculture. Satellites, drones, and other cameras scout field, predict disease, and enable farmers and agronomists to work efficiently. “See & Spray” technologies using CV can cut herbicide use by 95% and other autonomous weeding machines bypass herbicides altogether. CV in animal agriculture can detect illness or stress before it would be detectable by humans. By identifying stress and diseases in plants and animals faster, CV will allow for quick, precise action, thus minimizing waste or treatments while helping create optimal growth environments for crops and livestock.

What’s Next?

Revolutions are times of massive opportunity to build. What we have covered is only the tip of the iceberg. Other technologies are being incorporated into agriculture that will reduce transaction costs, increase nutritional value, connect farmers to consumers, enable smallholder farmers, revolutionize genetic selection, and change the face of food production either subtly or radically. The cost of technological development and deployment has been vastly reduced by investments in connectivity and integration of cloud computing from major players. This opens the way for new companies to enter this space, find partners and build a brighter future. Optimism about agriculture building a brighter future is historically the most profitable trend for any company looking to change the world.

To learn more about the Fourth Agricultural Revolution (Agriculture 4.0) and the technologies supporting the food quality and production efficiency, read IDC’s new, complimentary eBook, The Digital Agriculture Revolution: A Survival Guide. Click the button below to download the eBook now.

The latest indicators point towards a further decline in GDP in the second quarter in the US. If that is indeed the case, many in the financial community are ready to declare that the US is already in a recession (given that we saw a decline of -1,6% in US GDP in Q1). However, the select committee of economists tasked with making the call are unlikely to label this a recession in the short term. The reason: very mixed data. 376 000 jobs were added to the US economy during the month of June. In parallel, inflation in May reached its highest level since late 1981. This is a very unique version of stagflation, and economists are expecting interest rate rises throughout the rest of 2022.

This situation is the latest in the storms of disruption affecting the market right now. The litany of storm keeps growing: ongoing pandemic management challenges, major supply constraints, significant skills shortages in IT and broader technical areas, rapidly increasing cybersecurity threats, evolving climate regulations, and assertions of sovereignty over digital business triggered by the Russia-Ukraine War. With these developments, business leaders are now facing rising inflation, and many are anticipating a significant slowdown in economic activity. The US may be earlier to sound the alarm, but the EU is forecasting a similar situation by early 2023. And while in country recession fears are not a major focus in Asia/Pacific, there are question marks around the potential knock-on effects across the region.  IDC’s recent poll of 100 CIOs globally indicated that 79% expected a recession in their own country, or in important buyer countries in the next year. 95% of those believe it either has already started or will hit us in the next 12 months. Of 77% of them think it will last at least a year. Most, however, expect it to be a modest or moderate slowdown, not a deep recession.

As Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan Chase) explained recently, ‘I said they’re storm clouds. They’re big storm clouds or – it’s a hurricane. That hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way…and you better brace yourself.’

For the technology markets that IDC tracks, this is also a unique situation. This will be the first potential recession in the context of a ‘As-a-Service’ Technology Landscape[1]. Cloud now dominates tech spend across infrastructure, platforms, and applications. In fact, globally the cloud market will represent 40% of WW enterprise IT spend in 2022 (excluding devices and telecom services). An even more telling point is that over 50% of all spending on all software will be as-a-Service by the end of 2022, rising to almost 2/3^rds by 2026.

While 63% of the CIOs indicated that they would be either making targeted reductions in IT spend or reduce overall IT budgets, many organizations are continuing to invest in strategic technology projects to support business initiatives (e.g. Analytics, Automation, CX, EX and supply chain transformation) as part of broader digital transformation efforts. In many tech-savy enterprises, up to a third of all spending (not just IT spending) is for technology. Given the focus on cloud when it comes to Tech, IDC expects that the dynamics of that spend will look very different to the past.

Phil Carter and I want to share five key parameters to monitor:

1. Consumer vs Enterprise: IDC spending data already shows a significant difference between consumer IT spending (focusing more on devices and media/content services) versus the enterprise, where spend is proving to be much resilient (driven primarily by cloud). For more details on these trends check out IDC’s recent Global Recession Scenario for IT Spending webcast.
2. Enterprise CAPEX vs. OPEX spend: In previous economic downturns, IT spend followed GDP trends closely as large-scale CAPEX purchases were put on hold or cancelled altogether. Now, we are dealing with much longer-term multi-year contracts that tech buyers have put in place across the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS layers. Hence overall IT spend will not see the same level of spikiness as in past downturns at a market level. In fact, the real pressure will be on the Cloud Providers themselves as they still need to invest capital in IT hardware and datacenters to support all those long term commitments.
3. Cloud Contract Flexibility: IDC is already seeing examples of more flexible cloud contracts being negotiated – minimal short-term pricing increases to drive longer term or larger consumption commitments over longer periods, using reserved cloud instances as a way to get better pricing terms or very favorable licenses and maintenance conversion options in exchange for longer term contracts. The goal for both sides being to reduce cost volatility over an extended period, making capacity planning and cost accounting more predictable.
4. Cloud Margins and Cloud Price Increases: For the first time since their inception, many cloud vendors are increasingly under margin pressure. This is linked to increased input costs (infrastructure and energy) and the strong dollar impacting international revenues. As a result, IDC expects the prices of the cloud offerings overall will increase in the range of 5-7% over the next 12 months. This will be an especially important development for major software providers who are at the mid-point of their own journeys to SaaS business models. Managing changing cost expectations for the underlying infrastructure whether owned or “rented” from IaaS providers is now their business challenge, rather than their customers’ operational challenge.
5. Cloud Value Realization: Over the past 12-24 months, the pandemic-driven tech spend exuberance has highlighted the cost of cloud. At the platform level, every development decision is a budgeting decision. The focus on FinOps and scrutiny on the ROI has ramped up. The current economic situation will accelerate this trend. One of the key challenges will be to ensure that they aren’t spending on an “As-a-Service in name only” solution that simply alters the financing calculus. The real benefit of an effective As-A-Service offering is that it reduces and even eliminates the long term operational and upgrade costs associated with software and infrastructure lifecycles. Observability will be a critical part of FinOps.

RELATED READING: Enable your sales team to sell value rather than competing on price and features. IDC's new checklist is available now.  Start Value Selling Today. Optimizing Customer Value Best Practices. 

Looking back at history, the 2007-2008 financial crisis was the trigger for cloud’s to move into the mainstream. However, that was a real market crash. One software executive recently highlighted to IDC how $1 Billion in pipeline evaporated in the matter of days. The current situation is more of a dripping tap than a burst pipe. There is a long run up for policy makers and it’s the inflation vs. growth balancing act – with interest rates being the lever – hence why the market is watching the monetary policy makers very closely.

For the IT market, IDC expects continued resilience in the enterprise space – driven by this ‘As-a-Service’ technology landscape. Cloud vendors new and old will have to think about how to recalibrate their business in an uncertain demand climate. Second quarter earnings will be a early litmus test for the winners versus the losers. And tech buyers will have to find ways to continue delivering accelerated time to value from their cloud spend – or else their investment taps will slowly be turned off.

For more insights, watch our on-demand webinar: State of the Market Special Edition: Global Recession Scenario for IT Spending

• [1] You could argue that the initial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic also fell into this timeframe, but the tech spend spike we saw in that period was unprecedented, and was driven by the need to keep businesses afloat where everything literally was required to be digital. Hence it is very unlikely to be repeated, so it is impossible to use a reference point in this regard.

Every industry ecosystem is unique, with a different core mission and set of participants.  Each ecosystem will scale and change over time, depending on the customer, consumer, citizen, or patient needs and/or the natural disruptions that will occur. 

In some industries, shared data & insights has emerged as the preeminent ecosystem business model, while in others, joint ventures to develop new applications addressing common problems or opportunities is the focus.  Some organizations, as we saw emerge during the pandemic, realized that a shared operations and expertise approach helped to fill skills and knowledge gaps in an on-demand way.

The reality is that many organizations do not work in a shared, co-innovative way with industry ecosystem partners.  They may have limited or no sharing and collaboration other than the day-to-day connection with suppliers or service providers.  For some, that may be enough.  We think, however, that every organization can benefit from expanding the breadth and type of industry ecosystem partners, from a variety of industries. 

In fact, our 2021 global Future of Industry Ecosystems survey showed that by the end of 2023, almost 60% of respondents will be expanding the number of partners they work with outside of their core industry.  This is the ultimate state of an industry ecosystem, but accessible to any size organization, even if for a specific short-term project, initiative, or use case.  However, it could be that extending outside of a core industry is not feasible or desired for an organization, so the goal is to establish a diverse industry ecosystem of partners within the core industry that support and enhance every aspect of their business.

To that end, I have developed an IDC MaturityScape: Future of Industry Ecosystems as a guide for organizations planning to expand their ecosystems, wherever they are on their journey. 

The first step is identifying how mature the current approach is, and then where to evolve. This evolution could span limited sharing of data, applications, and operations to sharing across a value chain, industry network, and eventually, across multiple participants from different industries. Within the report, we describe each of the phases, as well as the supporting dimensions and sub-dimensions that organizations in every industry need to consider as the next phase of digital transformation takes hold.  That is, expanding innovation, decision making, and digital technology outside of the enterprise to enhance growth, improve resiliency, and consistently meet customer, consumer, citizen, or patient needs effectively. 

The phases of our MaturityScape model – as depicted in the following figure – span ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed, and optimized.

Expanding industry ecosystems, sharing data, applications, and operations openly with partners, is the next step in digital transformation.  Digital technology investments in cloud infrastructure and applications, business process orchestration, application development, AI, mobility, and analytics will enable better, faster communication, collaboration, data sharing, and innovation with ecosystem partners.  The challenge will be determining the starting point, and aspiration, for industry ecosystem expansion.

The Future of Industry Ecosystems is upon us, with our global survey data showing that CEOs and executive leadership recognize the critical supporting role that partners play in ensuring the growth and stability of their businesses.  Examples of shared data & insight, shared applications, and shared operations and expertise will continue to abound across every industry to facilitate innovation, ensure safety and quality, and engage more closely with customers, consumers, citizens, and patients so that needs are met quickly.  The first steps have been taken by many organizations to expand their industry ecosystems, establishing a network of capability, capacity, support, expertise, and knowledge that can be scaled up and down as required.  The next step, according to our 2022 Future of Industry Ecosystems global survey, is to incorporate partners from outside the core industry, to learn best practices and add assets, resources, and knowledge as necessary. 

Detail on the dimensions and subdimensions of our Industry Ecosystems maturity model, as well as guidance to organizations across the different phases, is available in the report
IDC MaturityScape: Future of Industry Ecosystems 1.0 to subscribers of the Future of Industry Ecosystems practice.   

The realm of intelligent automation continues to expand as enterprises look to connect information systems and process automation to improve overall enterprise intelligence. Automating knowledge work and decision environments requires a breadth of technologies and addressing broader challenges across data, processes, and people.

Our research suggests using intelligent automation is going to be critical in meeting the demand for enterprise intelligence skills of the future and keeping up with the exponential growth of data and the increasing speed of business. IDC’s August 2021 Future of Intelligence Survey indicated that more than one-third of respondents rated automation as a critically important part of increasing enterprise intelligence. In October 2021, IDC predicted that 40% of the G2000 will double the use of intelligent automation in knowledge retention, dissemination, and information synthesis by 2026, filling the skills vacuum in the data-to-insights life cycle. A more recent survey, IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 11, conducted in December 2021, indicated that investment in AI/ML-based automation is a nascent but highly differentiating part of enterprise intelligence initiatives.

IDC research indicates intelligent automation solutions show great potential for not only reducing costs but improving outcomes for buyers in areas such as:

• Operational efficiency
• Increasing output with the same workforce
• Resiliency and adaptability to business disruptions
• Customer experience
• Employee experience
• Revenue and profit growth
• Business model innovation

To reach these potential outcomes, organizations are investing in intelligent automation solutions that extend far beyond robotic process automation (RPA) to integrate technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), optical character recognition (OCR), business process modeling (BPM), process and task mining, application programming interface (API) integration and management, event-driven monitoring, low-code development platforms, cloud, and enterprise applications.

Beyond constructing the foundational technology platform, our research shows organizations also need to overcome a variety of challenges to adopt intelligent automation solutions, including data quality and management issues, lack of support and maintenance resources, insufficient skills or willingness on the part of employees to use intelligent automation technologies, and unclear use cases or business benefits.

Services providers can play a key role in the success of intelligent automation initiatives by supplying technical skills and expertise in strategy, architecture, process optimization, and change management to ensure solutions deliver business value and ROI.

I recently completed an in-depth assessment of 18 vendors in the worldwide intelligent automation services market, evaluating each vendor across 52 distinct scored elements. The analysis looked at both what vendors plan to do (strategies) and their ability to deliver today (capabilities) across the full life cycle of intelligent automation services seen in the graphic below.

Intelligent Automation Services

My assessment included the perception of intelligent automation services buyers of both the key characteristics and the capabilities of the vendors evaluated. Based on phone interviews and online surveys of more than 70 organizations across industries, ten key attributes emerged as most critical to a successful engagement with an intelligent automation services provider:

• Achieving desired business outcomes
• Quality of intelligent automation skills and knowledge
• Value delivery for fee paid
• Technical insights and competency
• Proven methodologies and tools for solving customers’ issues
• Employee engagement
• Functional insights and competency
• Data quality, management, governance, and security capabilities
• ROI models and cost-benefit analysis
• Innovation capabilities

As intelligent automation increasingly becomes an integral component of digital business and enterprise intelligence strategies, services providers have evolved their portfolios and expanded their capabilities in these dimensions and several others to meet a broader range of customer needs. Successful organizations partner with providers that understand their maturity, offer appropriate solutions, and provide insight to improve intelligent automation programs and deliver better business outcomes.

The pandemic forced enterprises in practically all sectors to use technology in new ways, including solving new problems related to supply chain delays and creating new sales channels to compensate for the closure of physical stores, due to social distancing requirements. Many organizations made an important discovery during this period – using digital technology to create innovative capabilities offers significant value. Innovators not only stayed afloat during the pandemic, they excelled.

IDC recently set out to discover if interest in pursuing digital innovation in the enterprise has changed since the height of the pandemic. We found that most organizations (69%) plan to deliver innovative digital products and service at the same or faster pace as the past two years. Only 27% said they’d slow down.

However, when we dug deeper into the data, we uncovered an interesting nuance. Larger companies are significantly more likely than smaller companies to speed up their development of digital innovation. Companies with fewer than 5,000 employees are less likely to say they will speed up the pace of digital innovation delivery than they are to say they plan to deliver at the same or slower pace.

The largest companies – those with at least 20,000 employees – are most likely (52%) to say that they’ll deliver innovative digital products or services at a faster pace than the past two years. They’re also the least likely to have plans to slow their pace of digital innovation (although the 6% in this cohort who said they had yet to deliver any digital innovation is higher than most of the other segments).

Some differences between the large and smaller organizations may be tied to funding availability. IDC research shows that budgets are a barrier to innovation and larger companies may be better positioned to outspend their smaller competitors.

In IDC’s view, the continued focus on digital innovation by larger organizations is part of a broader evolution – many of these enterprises are adopting digital-first strategies to support viable digital businesses. For the past five plus years, many enterprises have been making technology investments aimed at digitally transforming their businesses. These investments tended to have internal or technology-focused targets – accelerating the time it takes for employees to find answers to HR questions or reducing the time required to access new applications by shifting to the cloud.

However, many enterprises are undergoing a shift where they are building on the technology investments they made as they digitally transformed in order to run a viable digital business. Rather than setting technology goals, they are prioritizing business goals. Goals might include reaching revenue growth targets, improving customer net promoter scores, and entering new markets. Organizations that successfully execute this shift will derive a larger share of revenue from a digital business model.

Enterprises have also discovered that when they are able to deliver innovative digital capabilities – those that differentiate the company or disrupt a market – they are better able to achieve their business goals. This growing understanding of the role of innovation is driving the largest enterprises to continue to push for the delivery of innovative digital deliverables, even now that the more onerous restrictions of the pandemic have been lifted.

While these large enterprises may want to deliver continued innovation, many are discovering that doing so is a challenge. It requires invested C-suites, cultural changes, strong technology foundations, the right processes, and solid collaboration between the business and technology groups. IDC research indicates that the bulk of organizations are still immature when it comes to putting in place the practices and tools that support the ongoing delivery of innovative digital capabilities.

Interested in learning more about IDC’s Future of Digital Innovation research?

IDC’s April 2022 Future Enterprise Resiliency survey showed continued focus on industry ecosystems to improve innovation, flexibility, and resiliency.  Business leaders in organizations surveyed realize that leveraging ecosystem partners in support of shared data & insights, shared applications, or shared operations and expertise, is an efficient and cost-effective way of running their business. 

In short, industry ecosystems provide the ability to shift and flex processes and models to meet whatever opportunity or disruption presents itself. 

For example, manufacturers leverage this approach for innovation and manufacturing capacity, healthcare organizations share data and knowledge to improve patient outcomes, energy companies team up and share applications to ensure quality and high performance, and retailers work with their ecosystem partners to deliver goods and services to consumers in a blended physical and digital way.

The April survey showed that 84% of respondents are beginning or already engaged in a digital first strategy, and over half expect that they will expand their industry ecosystems outside their core industry in 2023.  Indeed, much like a sports team that needs depth of talent, capability, and knowledge to optimally compete, organizations in every industry recognize the need to have an expansive, flexible, and trusted set of resources and capital accessible, when they need this, through their industry ecosystems.

Before conducting the April survey, IDC published the first Future of Industry Ecosystems PeerScape in December 2021, based on last year’s global survey data and conversations with end users in different industries. IDC found that working with industry ecosystems in an open, iterative way was a key digital initiative for executives. 

The best practices from 2021 uncovered were:

• Institute an industry ecosystem control platform
• Enable a bi-directional flow of data across your industry ecosystem
• Share applications to empower industry ecosystems

In the next Future of Industry Ecosystems PeerScape, which will publish before the end of June 2022, case studies, respondent data, discussions in the field show a focus also on the following best practices:

• Enable closer engagement of customers and consumers through industry ecosystems
• Leverage ecosystem innovation hubs for more effective innovation
• Enhance trust across industry ecosystems through privacy preserving computation technologies

Each of these focus areas are consistent with our Future of Industry Ecosystems global survey data: innovation is the top reason why companies expand the breadth of their industry ecosystem partners; organizations have shown a concerted interested in a focus on improving customer engagement in multiple IDC surveys, particularly since the start of the pandemic in 2020; cyber security is the top IT priority for CEOs, business line leadership, and IT in support of industry ecosystem collaboration, innovation, and joint ventures.

Achieving an open, shared approach with partners is not easy: data, applications, operations, and capital (human, assets, and financial) for every organization are disparate of course; business processes are disconnected; security protocols and systems are not unified. Therefore, having a control platform and business orchestration layer is the first step to broadening industry ecosystem collaboration. 

The future of industry ecosystems — an expansion of ecosystem partners that organizations must work with in support of any situation, whether innovation, product or service change, dynamic demand, or unexpected disruption — is rapidly progressing as the new way of working to ensure innovation, flexibility, and resiliency. 

As we saw in our recent June PeerScape, organizations are looking to innovation hubs as a way to engage with their ecosystem, as well as directly with the customer, consumer, citizen, or patient.  And they are also focused on establishing trusted business models through new technology approaches focused on security and privacy, one of the most critical enablers of ecosystem scale, fair value sharing, and ongoing innovation.

“Expanding ecosystems within and outside core industries is rapidly becoming the next evolution in digital transformation.  Where over the last five years, organizations focused on investing in digital technology, unifying data, and moving to an evidenced-based culture, the next five (and beyond) will be spent extending digital outside of the company to look for new sources of innovation, and meet customer, consumer, citizen, or patient needs in the most effective, profitable, trusted, and sustainable way,” said Jeffrey Hojlo, research vice president, Future of Industry Ecosystems.