Organizations are Accelerating Digital Strategies for People-Centric Transformation, Reveals Unit4 Study

The study reveals that 84 percent of global decision-makers are expediting their digital transformation plans in response to increasing demands from users, who want more flexibility to work remotely in the future.

FREMONT, CA: Unit4, a leader in enterprise cloud applications for mid-market services organizations, has announced the findings of a new global study – Digital Enterprise Strategies for People-Led Transformation. It surveyed businesses, IT decision-makers as well as users working in service industries in August and September 2020 to understand how efficiently organizations are embracing innovation and adapting to the obstacles of the pandemic.

The study reveals that 84 percent of global decision-makers are expediting their digital transformation plans in response to increasing demands from users, who want more flexibility to work remotely in the future. During the coronavirus pandemic, global decision-makers stated three main impacts of Covid-19 on their enterprise applications strategies. They have become more agile in their planning (49 percent) as well as acknowledge the pace of innovation (42 percent) has increased, while 35 percent say that it has accelerated their investment in moving to the cloud and 24 percent are more comfortable failing fast. They have also highlighted specific priorities to enable workforces to be more productive, which shows that innovation has become much more focused on the requirements of users.

Since many organizations shifted to remote working during 2020, a positive outcome has been that 60 percent of global users say they have been more productive during the lockdown. They are also very satisfied that their IT systems have helped them to get the most out of their roles. It is perhaps not surprising that 84 percent of global decision-makers want to encourage colleagues to work remotely more often after the lockdown, which is reflected by 69 percent of global users who also want the same flexibility.

"New ways of working, initially broadly imposed by the global pandemic, are morphing into lasting models for the future," stated Mickey North Rizza, program vice president for IDC's Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce research practice. "Permanent technology changes, underpinned by improved collaboration, include supporting hybrid work, accelerating cloud use, increasing automation, going contactless, adopting smaller TaskApps, and extending the partnership ecosystem. Enterprise application vendors need to assess their immediate and long-term strategies for delivering collaboration platforms in conjunction with their core software."