The State of Industrial Digital Transformation

Introduction

Companies across the world have navigated an unpredictable and unprecedented 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic uncertainty has exposed vulnerabilities for businesses and pushed many to self-reflect on past, current, and future strategy.

A constant through this disruption is the increasing use of digital technologies. IDC puts global spend on digital transformation (DX) technologies and services for these programs at $1.3 trillion in 2020.

Our global survey of industrial companies supports this sentiment with 92% already on their DX journey. However, our analysis exposes critical nuances to DX strategies based on their maturity, which fall into three distinct stages: Planning, Piloting, and Rollout. The evolving mindsets for attainable value shifts for each stage from understanding where value is (planning), proving value exists or is realizable (piloting), and scaling value across the organization (rollout).

Companies at these different stages have distinct needs, project priorities, and potential blind spots. In this report, we complement data-driven insights and key takeaways from our global survey with case-study driven recommendations for each of these stages. The result is a framework for industrial organizations to use as a benchmark for where they are in their DX journey and how their priorities compare with the market.