When it comes to digital agility in Hong Kong, 69% of organisations fall into the slow or tactical stages of maturity, said Workday recently when releasing results of a survey.
This is despite increased technology and the opportunity to accelerate digital transformation during the pandemic, the firm noted, adding that collaboration across departments was the biggest challenge facing digital agility in Hong Kong, the firm noted.
The survey — the IDC-Workday Digital Agility Index Asia/Pacific 2022 — was done in association with IDC. It identifies organisations as “agility leaders” if they are found to be in the agile/integrated stages of digital agility maturity, or “agility followers” if it is determined that they are in the slow/tactical stages.
Hong Kong retains the 5th spot in this year’s Digital Agility Index, unchanged from 2020, according to Workday.
- Survey highlights
Only 31% of organisations are in the advanced stages of digital agility - 88% of Hong Kong organisations, HR and finance processes are disconnected, lacking a holistic view of resources for HR and financial planning.
- For example, with rising inflation and interest rates, only 7% of finance professionals have automation capabilities in place to detect and predict potential financial disruptions, Workday said.
- At the same time, 47% of IT professionals say that their organisations have monolithic architectures with tactical technology upgrades, survey results indicate.
- For most organisations, this contributes to challenges in ensuring consistent integration across systems (43%), delivering higher digital resiliency (40%), and driving business agility (30%).
- More than half (53%) of HR leaders in Hong Kong said they face challenges in delivering high HR service standards in times of rapid change.
- Only four in 10 (40%) of organisations in Hong Kong have enterprise talent systems and policies that maximise talent attraction and retention, while only three in 10 of organisations (31%) manage talents by having a holistic strategy with employee engagement and data analytics to identify training needs and growth areas.
Digital agility requires greater collaboration among CFOs, CHROs, and CIOs
While leveraging digital agility can offer competitive advantages in a digital-first economy, organisations need to rethink their approach to closing digital agility gaps through technology and alignment of functional business requirements across the C-Suite, Workday said.
For positive business outcomes, organisations must accelerate their digital transformation to narrow the agility gaps and have an integrated approach as a strategic imperative, the firm said.
This requires CFOs, CHROs, and CIOs to collaborate and work on their cross-functional digital transformation initiatives, integrate digital talent management, as well as HR and finance processes, Workday advised.
“Organisations need to emulate agility leaders and make the leap from tactical to enterprise-wide transformations in their culture, people, processes, and technology implementation.” said Lawrence Cheok, Associate Research Director of Digital Transformation at IDC. “This would help them achieve true digital agility, which is about capitalising on change to thrive.”
