These days, hardly a week goes by without an examination of the trends, effects, opportunities and challenges of digitization. There probably isn’t a single industry or market that doesn’t have to deal with this issue. So it isn’t surprising that the current “Digitization Index” from Telekom and Techconsult comes to the conclusion that German companies are intensely concerned with digitization. The degree of digitization achieved, however, is strongly dependent on company size and industry.
Almost three-quarters of the companies surveyed rate digitization as important to very important. It should be noted that the topic of digitization is given greater importance as the size of the company increases. While half of small companies (up to nine employees) see the need to deal with digitization, nine out of ten respondents from companies with more than 250 employees do.
The industry also makes a difference. Companies from the manufacturing industry as well as service providers value digitalization as very relevant. In the construction sector, on the other hand, only one in five companies consider digitization to be very important. Retail has very mixed results: although almost a third are already convinced of digitization’s importance to their business, just as many see only partial benefit.
Hope lies in innovation
From DARZ’s point of view, the study reveals one thing in particular. It shows that companies have two important objectives in the context of digitization. 53 percent hope for more innovative power and 54 percent want to win new customers and tap new markets. 49 percent also want to increase productivity.
DARZ’s focus is primarily on the innovative character of digitization. From our point of view, IT-driven innovations are the result of valuable data storage, processing and dissemination. Therefore, anyone who is able to use available data – internally as well as externally – is also able to further develop business. We are not talking about factor 3 of the “productivity increase” study, but of very new products and services. This data-centric innovation approach is not reactive or defensive to the preservation of one’s own competitive position, but instead actively aims at the conquest of new markets and ongoing change. For us, the result of Objective 1, to create innovation, is also the foundation for Objective 2, the acquisition of new customers and the opening up of new markets.
In this context, it is important to deal with modular Data Centric Services which with the support of a full IT service provider provide precisely the services to the extent required for the processing of your data.