The 4th annual Digital Business study, which surveyed 898 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) in North America (60%), APAC (22%), and EMEA (17%) was conducted to gain a better understanding of where organizations are in their journey towards becoming a “digital-first” business. Foundry defines “digital-first“ as approaching any new opportunity, or problem, with the assumption that the solution should be as digital as possible. According to the research, 93% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) have adopted or have plans to adopt a digital-first business strategy. To help them do so, organizations plan to invest in technologies such as artificial intelligence & machine learning.

Explore insights from Foundry’s Digital Business study to learn about the business objectives driving digital initiatives and how vendors can assist technology buyers on their path to digital success. Key takeaways from the research below:

2023 Digital Business key takeaways:
  1. When asked what their top objectives are for their organization’s digital business strategy, IT leaders ranked wanting to improve employee productivity/collaboration as their top objective (51%). This is up from the eighth-ranked objective when the survey ran in 2019 and up 7 percentage points from 2021 (44%).
  2. When it comes to achieving their digital objectives, ITDMs say that they are further along with some of them than they expected – improving security being their #1. Just under 40% of those surveyed believe that security is the most important step for success in digital transformation.
  3. The areas where organizations have made the most progress in order to become a digital business are with their data security/protection strategy (only 7% have no plans – 29% have already completed, 41% are in progress, and 23% are planning), data management strategy (with only 11% having no plans), developing a business case/roadmap for overall digital strategy, technology needs assessment, and determining the metrics of success.
  4. In order to become a digital business, organizations are actively researching AI/ML (32%), augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) (25%), and 5G (25%) – these are the top three technologies on their organization’s radars.
  5. When ITDMs were asked which emerging technologies they were investing in this year, cloud-native platforms (37%), AI engineering (32%), cybersecurity mesh (31%), decision intelligence (28%), and generative AI (25%) were the top five.

View the sample slides below for additional insight and download the full report to better understand and engage with tech buyers as they move forward with their digital business initiatives.