Future Readiness Drives Improved Business Results

In today’s economy, the success of organizations is driven by their ability to innovate and to adapt to change. A future-ready organization has the IT infrastructure and organizational practices in place to both initiate change and adapt to outside disruptions.

IDC works with a wide range of organizations that are pursuing future-ready strategies; they can expect better outcomes across a range of metrics based on these efforts. Unfortunately, many organizations that IDC speaks with are not future ready today, and they risk falling further behind if they don’t take steps to begin their future-readiness journey.

IDC’s Four Levels of Future Readiness

To characterize gaps and opportunities, this study categorized the level of future readiness at large and midsize organizations based on four aspects: use of converged infrastructure, adoption of cloud, capitalization on Big Data and analytics, and commitment to future-minded IT organizational structures and practices. Organizations were measured and ranked by behaviors in each aspect that was most closely linked to positive business outcomes.

Only 18% of the organizations in our study displayed the greatest degree of future readiness and were classified as Future Creators. They excelled across all four key aspects and reported the strongest results. A summary of the four levels as well as their key characteristics is provided in Figure 1.

Fig 1

Future-Readiness Category Profiles

	Current Focused	Future Aware	Future Focused	Future Creators
% of sample	16%	32%	33%	18%
Converged Infrastructure	Evolutionary approach to IT infrastructure Individualistic-driven IT transformation	Evolutionary approach to IT service delivery Team-driven IT transformation	Revolutionary approach to IT service delivery IT organization–driven IT transformation	Revolutionary approach to digital business Business-driven IT transformation
Cloud	No cloud efforts driven by IT organization Ad hoc use of public SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS clouds by business units	Pilot/limited private cloud deployment by IT organization IT notification of cloud use by business units	Well-defined public and private cloud service catalogs IT organization tracking use and implementing showback/chargeback across multiple clouds	Cross-cloud catalogs, audit/security, and data control Usage/performance tracking and automated balancing across diversified clouds
Big Data & Analytics (BDA)	Little or no BDA strategy BDA outputs have little influence on decision makers	Department-level BDA strategy BDA outputs have some influence on decision makers	Business unit–level BDA strategy BDA outputs have strong influence on decision makers	Enterprisewide BDA strategy BDA outputs have significant influence on decision makers
IT Organization	IT/LOBs operate on a “request/requirement” basis Less likely to engage in IT workforce planning	IT/LOBs are aligned for specific functions IT workforce planning is a 12-month hiring plan	IT/LOBs are aligned across all meaningful activities IT workforce planning considers future IT infrastructure and career planning	T/LOBs are aligned across all meaningful activities IT workforce planning includes career planning and infrastructure scenarios

	Current Focused
% of sample	16%
Converged Infrastructure	Evolutionary approach to IT infrastructure Individualistic-driven IT transformation
Cloud	No cloud efforts driven by IT organization Ad hoc use of public SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS clouds by business units
Big Data & Analytics (BDA)	Little or no BDA strategy BDA outputs have little influence on decision makers
IT Organization	IT/LOBs operate on a "request/requirement" basis Less likely to engage in IT workforce planning

	Future Aware
% of sample	32%
Converged Infrastructure	Evolutionary approach to IT service delivery Team-driven IT transformation
Cloud	Pilot/limited private cloud deployment by IT organization IT notification of cloud use by business units
Big Data & Analytics (BDA)	Department-level BDA strategy BDA outputs have some influence on decision makers
IT Organization	IT/LOBs are aligned for specific functions IT workforce planning is a 12-month hiring plan

	Future Focused
% of sample	33%
Converged Infrastructure	Revolutionary approach to IT service delivery IT organization–driven IT transformation
Cloud	Well-defined public and private cloud service catalogs IT organization tracking use and implementing showback/chargeback across multiple clouds
Big Data & Analytics (BDA)	Business unit–level BDA strategy BDA outputs have strong influence on decision makers
IT Organization	IT/LOBs are aligned across all meaningful activities IT workforce planning considers future IT infrastructure and career planning

	Future Creators
% of sample	18%
Converged Infrastructure	Revolutionary approach to digital business Business-driven IT transformation
Cloud	Cross-cloud catalogs, audit/security, and data control Usage/performance tracking and automated balancing across diversified clouds
Big Data & Analytics (BDA)	Enterprisewide BDA strategy BDA outputs have significant influence on decision makers
IT Organization	T/LOBs are aligned across all meaningful activities IT workforce planning includes career planning and infrastructure scenarios

Future-Ready Organizations Enjoy Better Business Results

IDC’s Future-Readiness Enterprise Study showed that the higher organizations move on the future-readiness scale within individual aspects and across multiple aspects, the better their business outcomes across a range of metrics. The difference can be seen by comparing business outcomes between the most future-ready organizations and the least future-ready organizations. Future Creators ranked significantly higher across every KPI in the study compared with Current Focused organizations. Notably, Future Creators experienced almost double the increase in revenue over the past three years compared with Current Focused (37% versus 18%). Employee productivity gains show a similar gap, with Future Creators experiencing 39% gains compared with 20% for Current Focused (see Figure 2).

Fig 2

KPI Improvements Seen over the Past Three Years

% of respondents

Increase in customer satisfaction

47 %

30 %

Increase in revenue from new products

42 %

27 %

Increase in employee productivity

39 %

20 %

Increase in employee retention

38 %

33 %

Increase in new customer acquisition

37 %

24 %

Reduction in time to market for new products and services

37 %

31 %

Increase in revenue or sales/bookings

37 %

18 %

Increase in profit margin

33 %

21 %

Future Creators (n = 460)

Current Focused (n = 417)

The Future Readiness Journey

The economic benefits are clear — future readiness corresponds to better business outcomes. But organizations that don’t find themselves at the top of the scale should not be disheartened. Future readiness is an ongoing journey, and organizations can see significant improvements in business outcomes from increasing their future readiness regardless of their starting point. Companies can also drive business results by choosing to focus on improving the specific aspect of their IT future-readiness landscape — converged infrastructure, cloud, BDA, and future-minded IT organizational practices — most relevant to their needs.

Further, the road doesn’t end even for Future Creators. As technologies, business practices, and market demands change over time, the concept of future readiness will also evolve. To maintain future readiness, organizations can’t become complacent — they will need to think of future readiness as an ongoing journey and stay nimble, adaptable, and innovative to maintain their competitive edge.