Konica Minolta and Keypoint Intelligence’s Digital Transformation Survey unveils challenges of digital transformation and how outsourcing can be a digitalisation enabler
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated numerous trends surrounding digital transformation, putting tremendous pressure on businesses to adapt remote work infrastructures and digitise their workflows. This overnight transformation has caused its share of pain points, especially among microbusinesses and SMBs that were not used to a remote infrastructure and already strapped for resources and budget. At the same time, many organisations have found outsourcing to be an effective tool at tackling digital transformation shortcomings in their own organisation. However, microbusinesses are behind the pack in terms of digital transformation. These are the findings of the Digital Transformation Survey* conducted by Keypoint Intelligence on behalf of Konica Minolta.
Data security, data protection (GDPR), remote working and shortage of IT personnel are the top challenges
Cybersecurity threats have been a growing issue in recent years and recent trends have only made this challenge greater: The abrupt shift toward remote working and the increased reliance on digital frameworks, coupled with infrastructure and education gaps from employees and companies on handling said workflows, created an atmosphere where criminals could thrive. This is also reflected in the study: Data security was named as the biggest challenge by the companies (34%). Almost four years after the introduction of GDPR in May 2018, the study also concludes that data protection (GDPR) is still a problem for many companies (28%). It is not only large companies that need to follow GDPR requirements, but small to medium-sized enterprises – those with more than 250 employees – must also do so. Looking at other results of the study, we find that around a quarter still have problems with remote working in terms of infrastructure / IT services (26%) and remote working in terms of applications/software (25%). In addition, 25% agreed that keeping up to date with new technologies is a challenge. At the same time, there is a shortage of specialised IT personnel (23%) who can solve these problems.
More than half of the companies outsource
To overcome these challenges, many organisations are getting external support. More than half of all organisations (51%) had already outsourced at least part of their workflows. Above all, IT security and data protection are at the top of the list of outsourced activities (46%). No wonder, issues of this nature can literally bankrupt organisations if not handled rapidly and effectively – security simply cannot wait. Application development (34%) and IT infrastructure (33%) are also frequently outsourced. Disruptions to either of these fields would mean lost productivity and potential security risks. The growing use of outsourcing reflects the reality that skilled IT personnel are in short supply. Many IT staff are also currently feeling overloaded and under immense stress from having to shift to remote workflow solutions, while maintaining data security and compliance.
