M’sian business leaders agree on need for digital transformation
KUALA LUMPUR: Microsoft (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd says 88 per cent of business leaders in Malaysia agree on the need to transform into a digital business to enable future growth.
Marketing and operations director Michal Golebiewski said the recent findings of the Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Survey to understand how business leaders are embracing the digital era showed that the business leaders, particularly those with titles of chief- high ranking executives, agreed that new data insights could increase revenue and lead to new revenue streams.
“However, only 34 per cent of companies had a complete strategy and were well on the way to digitising their business which includes matured and developed digital processes, people readiness and support systems in place to engage with customers,” Golebiewski told a media briefing here, today.
He said the digital transformation journey for most organisations in Malaysia is still in its infancy, as 47 per cent are progressing with specific initiatives for selected parts of their business, while 19 per cent have still a very limited or no strategy in place.
“Innovation is the key to digital transformation. In Malaysia, though, innovation towards creating new products, enabling new business models and revenue streams by businesses, is still not given priority. We need to improve from now. If you want Malaysia to be an innovative country, we need to work together and get start-ups and big companies to bring in new products,” he said, in commenting on how Malaysian companies were priortising their businesses.
The survey identified four main pillars, namely engaging with customers (37 per cent), empowering employees (28 per cent), optimising operations ( 23 per cent) and transforming products and enabling new business models (12 per cent). On emerging technologies, Golebiewski said the decreasing cost of devices had also made cloud computing affordable for companies of any size to transform digitally, according to 81 per cent of business leaders surveyed. — Bernama