Only one in three leaders in the Middle East expect their organisations to reach “future-ready” status within the next three years, according to a recent research report published by New York Stock Exchange-listed multinational professional services firm Accenture.
A small core of companies – approximately about seven percent globally and one percent in the Middle East – have achieved nearly twice the efficiency and three times the profitability of their peers in this regard.
According to the report titled Fast Track to Future-Ready Performance, the pandemic-driven acceleration of digital adoption, and the resulting agile ways of operating, could unlock $5.4 trillion in profitable growth, if applied broadly.
These future-ready companies have doubled down on digital transformation and retooled operating models, pivoting from incremental improvements to wholesale reinvention.
Based on a global survey of 1,100 senior-level executives and externally validated financial data, the report assessed the impact of achieving progressive levels of business operations maturity with the highest level being future-ready.
The higher the maturity, the greater the degree of digital capabilities, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, and data analytics.
For regional context, Accenture surveyed an additional 256 C-suite executives from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Accenture’s Intelligent Operations lead in the Middle East, Sumitha Das, said, “Scaling is needed in data use and business-tech collaboration for organisations in the Middle East to close the gap between them and their global counterparts.
“A focus on data is key to operational transformation. Without scaling data use, Middle East organisations may struggle to see benefits from analytics, automation, or AI.”
Although the Middle East still lags in being data-driven, adoption of data use is up more than 3x from 16 percent at widespread or full-scale use three years ago to 54 percent today.
Leading practices are also a crucial part of this future-ready strategy-first approach. Middle East organisations have traditionally trailed in this area but are making strides to catch up. Moreover, 93 percent expect to achieve full-scale leading practices in the next three years.
The findings show that the Middle East lags in some keys to operational maturity but shows positive signs in analytics, 74 percent globally versus 66 percent in the Middle East, while housing leading practices 68 percent globally versus 59 percent in the Middle East.
What does it mean to be “future ready”?
Future-ready enterprises transform how work gets done by using rich data for decision-making, augmenting people with artificial intelligence (AI) and employing agile workforce models with striking differences in digital adoption and operational maturity.
The areas they focus on include:
- Cloud: Across all industries, cloud is one of the most popular and important technologies being applied today. Currently, in the Middle East, 79 percent of leaders say they are scaling cloud infrastructure, a positive sign as only 56 percent were scaling three years ago.
- Machine Intelligence: With a focus on augmenting people with technology, 71 percent of future-ready organisations have fully adopted AI and data science capabilities, an 18-fold increase from just 4 percent three years ago. That number is growing, with 63 percent of future-ready organisations expected to scale AI practices by 2023.
- Automate at Scale: Two-thirds (67 percent) of future-ready organisations have adopted end-to-end digital processes, and 58 percent continue to scale leading practices compared with 32 percent and 6 percent of other organisations, respectively. Middle East organisations have improved their automation use more than 2.5x since 2017.
- Smarter Data: Future-ready organisations are more than ten times as likely as other organisations (52 percent vs. 5 percent) to use analytics at scale. One opportunity for increased data use is in operating model design. Only 59 percent of Middle East leaders prioritise data over executive intuition when considering their operating model.
- Agile Workforce: One-third (34 percent) of future-ready organisations have adopted an agile workforce strategy at scale, enabling them to tap into an expanded talent pool among ecosystem partners to mobilise unique talent as needed. Across key areas for operational transformation, 24 percent of Middle East executives reported talent as their top barrier.
Future readiness is part of an operations maturity journey that is constantly evolving. It helps organisations adjust to fluctuating conditions, make internal connections to power innovation, and enable performance gains.
Middle East businesses may be behind their counterparts in other parts of the world when it comes to operational maturity. However, many critical pieces are in the right places to make a radical leap forward.
The report is the first in a research series that looks at the drivers and trends shaping how enterprises and business functions operate in the Middle East and globally.
This article was originally published on our sister site, Arabian Business.
