London – 8 June 2020 Imago Techmedia, the company behind Digital Transformation EXPO (DTX), have released research results based on a survey of 400 large, medium and small businesses in the UK.

IT and business leaders, influencers and technicians were asked their considerations, challenges, and sourcing priorities around the technologies that enable digital transformation in the era of COVID-19. What IT changes are their businesses making in this unprecedented era?

Digital culture

The results demonstrated that, while digital transformation is an increasing necessity, it became very clear that technology alone is not a silver bullet when it comes to successful DX. If anything, culture is considered to be more important than technology:

• Culture and people transition is considered to be the biggest part of digital transformation, with 72% of respondents citing it
• The biggest challenge around DX by a long distance is ‘adapting culture quickly to new ways of working’, with 80% of respondents facing it

The key factors around that challenge are varied, with considerable numbers of people responding that they are prioritising:

• Managing change quickly: making sure your people are still productive, right now
• Successfully communicating between technology and business teams, and
• Planning your technology strategy for when all of this is over – figuring out the new needs of the user

The opportunity

When asked what words were associated with digital transformation, ‘opportunity’ was comfortably the most frequently chosen. When looking at the detail, of the people who believe DX to be an opportunity, the largest segment of those who answered were in positions of technical leadership (with IT Director and CTO the most frequently-occurring job titles), with slightly smaller segments coming from IT technical staff, non-IT business leads and channel partners.

What are IT teams buying in Q2 2020?

Survey respondents were also asked about which technologies they are currently sourcing. The responses showed that investments are very much focused on technologies for now, with cyber security and cloud being the top results. There was also a big rise in investment in unified communications and collaboration tools, as workforces work remotely en masse. This shift to remote working also increases the number of cyber-attack vectors exponentially, thereby increasing the need for cyber investment even further.

ENDS

Notes to editors:

Full research report - https://dt-x.io/dtx/en/node/newsitem-digital-transformation-insights-report-may-2020

Digital Transformation Expo – https://dt-x.io/europe/en/page/dtx-europe