Digital will dominate by 2020

Digital transformation will have a substantial impact on the Australian economy over the next 3–4 years, IDC Australia predicts.

The research firm has announced its top technology predictions for Australia through to 2020, chief among them being that by this time, half of Australia’s 500 largest companies will see the majority of their business depend on an ability to create digitally enhanced products and services.

IDC also expects that by 2018 over half of these companies will have dedicated digital transformation and innovation teams.

Progress with digital transformation initiatives will also become easier to track. IDC projects that by 2020 all enterprises will be using a new set of digital transformation driven benchmarks requiring 40% to 60% business performance.

Australian organisations began their digital transformation journey a few years ago, aided by third platform technologies including cloud computing, analytics and mobile technologies, IDC Australia Senior Research Manager Sabhari Bala said.

“Although there have been a few disruptors that embarked with a coordinated [transformation] effort, a vast majority of it has been just pockets of excellence in the form of departmental projects or initiatives that were incorporated in an uncoordinated fashion,” he said.

“[The year] 2016 was an inflection point for digital transformation in Australia; IDC believes that in the next four years, transformation will have a large-scale impact on organisations of all sizes.”

As the digital transformation journey continues, IDC also predicts that by 2019, third platform technologies and services will drive over 70% of IT spending.

By 2020, just over two-thirds (67%) of all enterprise IT infrastructure and software spending is meanwhile expected to be for cloud-based services. Emerging technologies including AI and augmented or virtual reality are also expected to play an increasingly important role in digital transformation initiatives.

IDC is meanwhile projecting the rise of what it calls the fourth platform. By 2020, the company predicts that a third of health/life science and consumer products companies will start developing the first wave of products and services that integrate third platform technologies with the human body.

Such “augmented humanity” offerings will become mainstream in the mid-2020s, Bala said.

Image courtesy of Detlef La Grand under CC

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