Keynote with Cushing Anderson, IDC

Join IDC Resarch Director, Cushing Anderson, as he explores the accelerating rate of digital transformation, describe the benefits that organisations can achieve by leveraging comprehensive skill development, and illustrate best practices IDC has observed in organisations that have set up successful skill development initiatives.

For many organisations, digital transformation is essential to business growth – and this involves a range of technologies, techniques and skills that are new or rapidly evolving. These new digital skills are therefore increasingly important to the enterprise – but these skills aren’t simply for the IT professionals. Non-technical professionals, especially business leaders, need to understand what these technologies can do and separate the hype from the reality. Many non-IT professionals will see their roles change to incorporate new techniques and new technologies – like leveraging cloud-based applications, new sources of data, analytics and process automation. For these changes to be successful, organisations must invest in comprehensive skill development programs to ensure employees across the organisation have the skills they need to successfully leverage new technologies.

Organisations with comprehensive skill development programs are 6 times more likely to move from pilots to meaningful projects and nearly twice as likely to reach full adoption of their digital transformation initiatives within 2 years. Those organisations that proactively build skills to leverage new tools have increased performance as a result of digital transformation, including • 90% greater growth in revenue from new product lines • 80% greater growth in revenue from established product lines • 50% greater improvement in compliance-related activities

This presentation will describe IDC’s views of the accelerating rate of digital transformation, describe the benefits that organisations can achieve by leveraging comprehensive skill development, and illustrate best practices IDC has observed in organisations that have set up successful skill development initiatives.