Singapore's Digital Transformation

Asia is known for the appetite of its businesses for innovation and within Asia, Singapore is often seen as the leading city for innovation and innovative thought. So it's interesting to see the results of surveys published in the "The Business Times".

In 2016, 49% of business leaders were said to be in denial of the need to for Digital Transformation. Yet by 2017, in another survey, only 16% of organisations said they had done nothing about digital transformation. Interestingly enough 50% were actively progressing a digital strategy and about a third had a strategy, but had not really got going on delivering it yet.

This is reinforced by claims in a ZDNet article  that over a quarter of businesses see Digital Transformation as essential to survival. The Singapore Business Federation has expressed concern that a significant proportion of businesses have not made a start on any form of business transformation and within this section two thirds demonstrate lower than average profitability.

However the latter survey was not without its apparent contradictions. three quarters of the survey respondents thought that new data insights would lead to new revenue streams, yet their highest priorities were customer engagement, optimising operations and empowering employees. Transforming products and enabling new business models trailed in at 4th in terms of priorities.

When it came to enabling technologies, Big Data (for Insight) was not mentioned. IoT was the leading technology, followed by AI, then wearable technology, and VR, followed up by quantum computing. Again this does not appear that consistent with enabling the stated priorities.

So whilst the enthusiasm is there and appears very strong, the clarity of thought appears to be not quite crystalised. Perhaps this is a symptom of rapid change in attitude.

Interstingly enough, the top 3 roles associated with leading digital transformations in the 2017 survey were CDO, CIO then CEO. CMOs appear to be out of the running there.