​Be a digital business to succeed: Microsoft Study

Business leaders in Southeast Asia are showing urgency in embracing the 4th Industrial Revolution, where 84 per cent of them believe that they need to transform to a digital business to enable future growth and 83 per cent agree that new data insights can lead to new revenue streams for their organisations.

These are some of the key findings of the Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Survey to understand how business leaders are embracing the digital era.

Technology advancements have ushered in the 4th Industrial Revolution, where cutting-edge technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data analytics, and mixed reality are powered by cloud computing to create limitless possibilities in transforming the way people work, live and play.

This revolution, together with rapid urbanisation, emergence of the millennial workforce and a fragile global economic climate, is ushering societal and economic changes at an unprecedented pace.

The Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Study surveyed 572 business leaders from Southeast Asia. All respondents were pre-qualified as being involved in shaping their organisations’ digital strategy.

Even as majority of business leaders are aware of the urgent need to transform digitally to address the changing business climate, the study found that the transformation journey for most Southeast Asian organisations is still at its infancy.

In fact, only 31 per cent of business leaders have a full digital transformation strategy and less than half 47 per cent are in progress with specific digital transformation initiatives for selected parts of their business; 23 per cent still have very limited or no strategy in place.

“The Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Study has shown that business leaders have started to act on the need for digital transformation to address the challenges and opportunities of the 4th Industrial Revolution in the region. Lessons from past industrial revolutions have taught us that organisations that do not evolve fast enough will be less competitive or even obsolete as they face disruptions in every industry,” said Vu Minh Tri, CEO Microsoft Vietnam.

“We urge organisations of all sizes to digitally transform themselves amidst changing demands externally and internally, to stay relevant.

“At Microsoft, we believe this involves transformation in four key pillars – empowering employees, engaging customers, optimising operations and transform with new products, services or business models, and data and the cloud are key enablers of these,” Tri added.

Microsoft has defined what it means to transform in four key pillars:

Engage customers: Consumers are savvier than ever before, with access to data ensuring they are often educated on a product or service before engaging.

To stand out, organisations will need to deliver a new wave of deeply contextual and personalized experiences, while balancing security and user trust.

Empower employees: The nature of how we work and the workplace itself has undergone a dramatic evolution. Organisations can empower their people and help them do their jobs better with the power of mobility, which allows employees to collaborate from anywhere, on any device, and access apps and data they need, while mitigating security risks.

Optimise operations: Technology disrupters such as IoT are accelerating the potential for businesses to optimise their operations. This can be done by gathering data across a wide, dispersed set of endpoints, drawing insights through advanced analytics, and then applying those learnings to introduce improvements on a continuous basis.

Organisations in manufacturing, retail, and even healthcare can shift from merely reacting to events to respond in real time, or even pre-emptively anticipating and solving customer issues.

Transform products& business models: The opportunity to embed software and technology directly into products and services is evolving how organisations deliver value, enabling new business models, and disrupting established markets.

The Study found that business leaders are putting people at the forefront of their digital transformation strategies:

Prioritization of Digital Transformation pillars among Southeast Asian business leaders today

According to Tri, it’s concerning to see that while there is widespread acknowledgement on the need to transform, they are doing so incrementally.

With constant pressure from newer, agile and tech savvy players disrupting across industries in Asia, the transformation of products and new revenue models provides the greatest opportunity for organisations to truly lead rather than be disrupted.

“Leaders need to rethink business models, find new data insights which lead to new revenue streams. And they need to do this by embracing a different way of bringing together people, data, and processes, which create value in a new digital business,” Tri said.