A study from Telefónica Tech, which gathered responses from a total of 810 IT professionals in Spain, Brazil, Germany, the UK and the Republic of Ireland, finds 60% of the IT professionals surveyed recognize that after the pandemic their company is better positioned in terms of ICT strategy, but 28% confess that they are only concerned with immediate needs.
Organizations around the world significantly accelerated their adoption of technology services during COVID-19 to drive their Digital Transformation and boost their resilience.
Telefónica Tech’s Planting Digital Seeds for the Future study reveals that, although lack of budget is the main constraint to fulfilling their ICT strategy, 57% of the global companies surveyed plan to invest more in ICT over the next two years and 35% plan to invest the same amount.
The study, which gathered responses from a total of 810 IT professionals in Spain, Brazil, Germany, the UK and the Republic of Ireland, notes that the majority of organizations surveyed say the pandemic has accelerated their ICT strategy and they are now in a better position than before (60%), but 28% still say they are only dealing with immediate needs.
However, 81% of global companies admit to having made urgent ICT purchases to adapt to pandemic conditions that will not bring them strategic value in the long term.
The study shows that 48% of the organizations surveyed brought forward strategic ICT plans (including collaborative and cloud technology) to deal with the pandemic.
Meanwhile, 31% of companies quickly changed their business and reviewed their ICT, 17% analyzed their existing technology and used it more effectively and only 2% of respondents said they had not made any changes.
In addition, more than half of the companies surveyed highlighted that the main lesson learned from the pandemic was that aligning people and processes with their technology strategy led to significant efficiency gains compared to how they did it before. This result is most notable among companies in the biotechnology (80%), retail (76%), finance (72%), food and beverage (70%) and public administration (68%) sectors.
For the next most valuable lesson learned, respondents point to the importance of greater collaboration within the company to make better ICT decisions (47%), with companies in the healthcare (72%), agriculture (69%) and energy (67%) sectors being particularly prominent. This is followed by 31% of survey respondents recognizing that they had left themselves open to potential security vulnerabilities due to poor remote working practices prior to the pandemic.
The companies’ assessment also points to the fact that 20% were not utilizing the tools previously available to them and that 15% had made poor ICT decisions before the pandemic. In addition, 13% of respondents came to realize that they cannot combine old processes with new technology, but that the two need to change in tandem.