ITWeb, in partnership with The CRM Team, conducted a Digital Technology Adoption survey during May 2022 to find out how effectively South African companies and people are adopting technology in different industries.

A total of 209 valid responses were captured - 68% of respondents are at exec or mid management level and 32% are at IT staff or consultant level. Just under a third (31%) of respondents work in the IT sector, 13% come from Financial Services and 12% Government.

Here are the key findings:

1. Just over half of respondents (53%) said their organisation had the right software to serve its customers. 32% said they didn’t but it was required or being planned.
   
   
2. Half of respondents (49%) said they’d had a digital adoption strategy for 3 or more years. 20% said they’ve had a digital adoption strategy for 1 to 3 years. 13% said they have no current plans to engage in a digital adoption strategy. 12% said they were just about to launch a digital adoption strategy, while 6% said they’d had a digital adoption strategy for less than a year.
   
   
3. Asked to identify the biggest benefit from digital technology adoption, 41% cited improved customer experience, 17% said growth, 11% said employee empowerment and 11% said lower operating costs.
   
   
4. Respondents were asked how familiar they were with the ADKAR model of change management and 57% said they didn’t know what it was. A quarter (25%) know about ADKAR but have never used it and 12% have used ADKAR to manage change on various projects.
   
   
5. Asked to rank what had assisted with digital technology adoption at their organisation, online training came out tops (22%), followed by cross functional collaboration (14%), integration with customer experience (14%) and change management practices (12%).
   
   
6. The main business issues that digital technology adoption will resolve were listed as: increased agility (15%), make it easier to serve customers (14%), improve innovation (14%), improve collaboration across departments (12%), increased revenue (10%) and reduce non value-added work (10%).
   
   
7. The technologies that respondents are planning to implement within their digital adoption strategies were:
   
   • Cloud business applications (CRM)(17%)
     
   • Microsoft 365(17%)
     
   • Artificial intelligence(17%)
     
   • Data insights (Customer Data Platform)(15%)
     
   • Advanced Analytics(14%)
     
   • Robotic process automation(11%)
     
   • Platform development(10%)
   
   
8. The top 3 drivers for digital technology adoption are customer experience improvement (16%), innovation (13%) and process improvement (13%).
   
   
9. The biggest barriers to adoption of digital transformation are: lack of budget (29%), lack of resources (21%) and lack of digital business skills (17%).
   
   
10. The survey highlights that digital technology adoption is primarily driven by the CEO (32%), followed by the CIO (21%).