Mickey North Rizza, group vice president at IDC, shares findings of a 2024 study conducted on behalf of Workday to better understand the needs and plans for business technology across more than 10 industries. Learn how industries are taking on AI, digital transformation, staffing challenges and more.
This article was written for the Workday Blog by Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, enterprise software at IDC.
IDC recently conducted a study on behalf of Workday to better understand the needs and plans for business technology across more than 10 industries. And with AI’s impact growing every day, we wanted to better understand how each industry is using it and any challenges they face.
We also looked to uncover organisations’ ability to embrace digital transformation to gain a competitive edge within their industries – including finding and nurturing the best talent.
Our study included over 4,000 respondents from North America, Western Europe and Asia/Pacific, mostly at the director level and above in IT, finance and HR roles. These individuals were quite transparent, letting us know about their enterprise application and technology requirements for improving their businesses.
The respondents focused on digital transformation, the utilisation of AI, and challenging areas such as talent management, skills gaps and manual processes that were holding them back. Let’s take a deeper look at some of our key findings from the study.
AI has brought significant benefits in productivity and efficiency for many organisations. In addition, it’s helped move industries into the digital world. Some of the industries that have embraced AI and found immediate impact include:
Higher education, with the use of a touchless curriculum and AI’s assistance in catalogue management and student information management.
Retailers, by improving frontline, customer-focused workforce management and streamlining employee recruitment, onboarding, training, learning, engagement and skills management.
Hospitality, by streamlining technology touchpoints with clients.
Manufacturers, by providing organisational visibility via AI’s use in half of all major initiatives across finance, HR/frontline worker management and ERP systems.
While these examples have aided organisations in their knowledge of AI and their quest to use it, there are still many challenges they’re struggling to overcome. Some of the biggest concerns with AI were the changing of datasets, accuracy, AI governance and complexity around IT infrastructure.
Healthcare providers ranked AI privacy concerns high, and those within the technology industry said they’re still working on how to implement AI sustainably. The banking industry worries about AI in terms of privacy and dataset accuracy.
While the leaders we surveyed have clearly paved new digital-world models with AI, they still face challenges. The great news is that organisations are embracing opportunities to accelerate learning from their use of AI and starting to see the land of AI opportunities in the form of new best practices, improved insights and decision-making and productivity gains.
Digital transformation activities continue to be ongoing for a plethora of industries. Our study revealed that digital transformation efforts are of critical importance to industries of all sizes. However, digital transformation delays continue – we found that a large percentage of organisations still face the hindrance of reliance on spreadsheets and manual processes and spend too much time on low-value data entry and tasks.
“Organisations are embracing opportunities to accelerate learning from their use of AI, and starting to see the land of AI opportunities in the form of new best practices, improved insights and decision-making and productivity gains.”
Mickey North Rizza
Group Vice President, Enterprise Software
IDC
In both the professional services and technology industries, organisations feel frustrated with manual activities and the extra work they create for their employees. In manufacturing, the manual and inefficient data flows between systems have stalled digital transformation initiatives.
In banking and insurance, poor user experience detracts from system usability and employee satisfaction. In healthcare and retail, systems lack the customisation and flexibility to meet specific organisational requirements.
In fact, the list of frustrations across industries is quite exhaustive – and this is why so many organisations are embracing digital transformation. In almost all industries, nearly one-third of respondents cited the need to move to cloud-based systems to solve their problems; the remainder are already seeing many of their problems being solved with innovative cloud-based systems – a clear signal that the technology is working.
The organisations needing to move to cloud-based systems believe the technology will help them increase their efficiency and agility by streamlining processes and aid them in responding to changing market conditions faster, bringing more data insights across the organisation, improving risk management and enhancing customer service.
The lack of automation, integration and connectivity with respondents’ current systems was eye-opening. Nearly one-quarter of survey respondents in banking, hospitality and healthcare said that their current systems need major upgrades to support better ways to forecast, budget and plan. In healthcare and government, organisations need to find the right talent to integrate new finance technology, and manufacturing organisations need to integrate workforce management tools with plant floor operations and logistics systems.
It’s quite clear from the study that organisations need cloud-based systems for automation, modernisation and innovation. Without improved focus on and acceleration of digital transformation activities, organisations can lose their competitive advantage, regardless of industry.
The digital world has set a new standard in competitiveness as the long, cumbersome legacy processes have moved to innovative cloud-based systems that bring greater insights and faster decisions. These innovative cloud-based systems enable organisations to pivot quickly in response to disruptions while also managing the business in real time.
In our study, we sought to understand how staffing challenges impact business goals. While organisations are embracing technology, their level of automation and use of modern, cloud-based innovative technology systems show that they have a gap in employee skills. These organisations have a direct need for improved employee skills and more training to accommodate their modern and innovative technology.
“Without improved focus on and acceleration of digital transformation activities, organisations can lose their competitive advantage, regardless of industry.”
Staffing and skills are a challenge across many industries for a variety of reasons, although there are many similarities. The healthcare, government, banking and insurance industries continue to face skills shortages overall, while in manufacturing and retail shortages exist because of the lack of planning for demand volatility and seasonality.
These issues point to the need for systems that can identify the types of skills organisations need and help better recruit and retain the talent required to attain overall performance goals.
As an example, government organisations find that they don’t have the right workforce mix for their operational needs, which is why they’re investing in technology. These tech investments include incorporating technology tools to streamline recruitment and hiring for faster employee onboarding; using HR tools to support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and improving workforce engagement and job satisfaction.
Executive management is also putting more pressure on HR to modernise enterprise frontline solutions. In the insurance business, HR professionals feel the particular burden of poor user experiences that detract from system usability and employee satisfaction. Consequently, they seek enhanced HR module usability to improve employee and agent navigation and self-service capabilities.
In general, across all industries in our study it’s apparent that organisations are missing opportunities by not focusing on the right staffing strategies and on retaining the employees they need to make them successful. Organisations need to address opportunities to empower their staff; keep them engaged; reduce the time spent trying to bring together siloed systems; and move towards faster onboarding and training, upskilling, filling of talent gaps, performance management, and attraction and retention of the right talent.
Organisations across industries must move beyond their current systems, embrace modern technology, look towards innovation such as AI, and embrace the change with investments in ERP, finance and HR/frontline worker systems.
All industries have issues that they can’t address without the right investments in modern cloud-based systems that connect their people, automate their business processes and underpin their organisations with digital technology to enhance their performance.
What else did the 2024 Workday-sponsored IDC Research reveal? Find out more about what’s happening in your industry in the new Workday industry-specific whitepapers.
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