CAMBRIDGE, Mass., August 9, 2016 – Quickbase Inc., a leading low-code application development platform provider, today released new research on the state of digital transformation based on responses from CIOs, and senior IT and operations staff involved in their organizations’ digital transformation efforts. The research—The Quickbase Digital Transformation Survey—contains insights into the current state and progress of digital transformation for organizations pursuing these efforts. A report summarizing the findings is available at http://apps.quickbase.intuit.com/digital-transformation-survey-2016.
Notably, the survey showcases the growing disconnect between how high-ranking executives view their transformation progress and what’s actually happening on the ground floor. This is most prominent when respondents rate themselves against their industry peers: seventy percent of C-Suite respondents believe they are ahead or way ahead of other organizations, compared to 30 percent of other employees, including those in the line of business. However, there was agreement regarding the state of transformation efforts across the board: Eighty percent report their transformation efforts are well underway or complete.
The survey and report also seek to define digital transformation, identifying it as the use of technologies that empower employees, both within and outside IT, to lead change that improves business performance, transparency, efficiency, speed and agility.
“While many organizations are talking about digital transformation, we wanted to understand how people are perceiving their progress — especially now that citizen development invites employees from all areas of the business into the process,” said Karen Devine, VP of Marketing of Quickbase. “We find the most successful organizations are the ones who leverage the unique strengths of all employees. Backed by executive support at the top, central IT can use their advanced coding skills for complex tasks like building app architectures while citizen developers in operations or the line of business can customize apps to fit their processes exactly.”
Other key findings from the survey include:
- Digital transformation remains a top priority in 2016. Among those surveyed, 68 percent of management staff and an overwhelming 97 percent of the C-level agree it is a top priority for their organizations.
- IT developers are still building and implementing new technologies in a silo. Respondents said they rely on corporate IT nearly half the time (47 percent) as the dominant decision-maker, and 67 percent of the time to develop applications for digital transformation in operations. Respondents identify the unavailability of IT staff as one of the top barriers to their success with digital transformation, which indicates organizations may need to look for ways to offload the burden currently borne by IT.
- Employees are ready to digitally transform organizations from the ground up, and management should find a way to let them. A strong majority (84 percent) agreed that for digital transformation efforts to succeed, it’s important for employees to have the freedom to start using solutions on their own—for example, through bring-your-own-device (BYOD) or citizen development tools.
- Technologies that facilitate data integration, workflow automation and cloud-based services will continue to play an important role in digitally transforming organizations. Respondents overwhelmingly agreed (>80 percent) with this statement, suggesting the need for organizations to better share data across silos to achieve digital transformation.
To illustrate the results of the survey, Quickbase also published an infographic detailing these findings: https://www.quickbase.com/blog/infographic-tells-story-of-the-winning-team-in-digital-transformation-race#infographic.
Methodology
The survey was conducted on behalf of Quickbase by Market Cube between February 25 and March 3, 2016 among 301 American business employees, each of whom indicated at least some involvement in their employer's digital transformation efforts. Respondents were drawn from diverse industries including finance, manufacturing, software, retail and healthcare, with roles spanning business operations, IT and management, and ranging in seniority from manager-level through the C-suite.
The margin of error is 5.6 percent.