• Organisations need to become more composable in their business.
• With composability, CIOs can achieve digital transformation, greater resiliency and innovation through disruption.
• IT spending in India is expected to grow 6% next year to $81.9b from $79.3b this year as CIOs start positioning IT not as just a growth enabler but a ‘survival necessary’ strategy.

Companies that do not invest in digital technologies and reinvent will have to retire some of their businesses, an industry expert said.

“Businesses that rely too heavily on manual work and resisted in investing in technology over the years, especially digital commerce, will be badly hit. If they haven’t awakened yet to the call and continue as is, their survival is going to be a big challenge,” Arup Roy, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said at the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo India.

Organisations that were digitally sound in a pre-pandemic world could contain the impact on their business, he said and added that the pandemic situation was a wake-up call for many organisations to relook and revive their IT strategies and increase their spending on IT in 2021.

“We have seen much of disruptions this year but the good news is that the businesses have responded quite well. The credit goes to the technology and CIOs offices. CIOs are leading their organisations through increasing turmoil,” he said.

In 2019, he said that there were 365 million office-based desktop workers globally but in 2020, more than one billion people are working from home. 

“It was a mega shift and it is really not easy. CIOs rose to the challenge, prioritised their digital strategies, innovated and adapted for the future,” he said.

According to a survey conducted by the research firm, 69 per cent of corporate directors want to accelerate their digital business initiatives and more than 60 per cent of poll respondents believe that they are in a period of long and sustained disruption.

Digital transformation

 “It shows that the mandate is now top-down and it is going to accelerate from here. You have to be agile to face disruptions. There are going to be disruptions and there is not going to be any respite on that.  The answer is to become more composable in your business,” Roy said.

Composable Business means – architecting for resilience and accepting that disruptive change is the norm; supporting a business that exploits disruption by making things modular; mixing and matching business functions to orchestrate the proper outcomes; supporting a business which discovers when a change needs to happen and using autonomous business units to creatively respond.

Roy said that composable Business allows for quick action in moments of composability.

With composability, he said that CIOs can achieve digital transformation, greater resiliency and innovation through disruption.

“CIOs can compose a new and better enterprise and bring composure to a world that needs it now more than ever. CIOs throughout the private and public sectors are using composable business to combine what their organisations do well with new technology and ecosystem resources,” he said.

Even though Covid-19 stalled many digital transformation projects for Indian enterprises due to market uncertainties and reduced cash flows, he said that IT spending is expected to grow six per cent next year to $81.9 billion from $79.3 billion this year.

In 2019, the IT spending stood at $92 billion.

In 2021, Roy said that IT spending growth will return as CIOs start positioning IT not as just a growth enabler, but a ‘survival necessary’ strategy.

Digital India mission

Contrary to other markets where spending declined across all segments, he said that CIOs in India continued to spend on enterprise software, IT services and communication services in 2020.

While all segments will experience an increase in spending, the enterprise software segment will achieve the highest growth of 13.6 per cent, followed by data centre systems at 8.3 per cent in 2021.

“The ‘Digital India’ mission will turn a new leaf in 2021 as enterprises across all sectors start spending more on IT. The pandemic provided an opportunity for Indian CIOs to test long-pending projects such as remote working, which delivered on-promise for many enterprises and helped them stay afloat in the most testing times,” Roy said.

“The success of these digital innovations has brought back the focus on investments in IT.”

In 2021, he said the focus of IT spending will be in becoming a truly digital business and CIOs will direct their IT spending budgets towards accelerating digitisation efforts.

Spending is expected to increase on technologies including advanced analytical solutions, access management, encryption software, desktop as a service, cloud, and hyperautomation enabling systems. IT solutions such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and digital commerce will also experience an increase in spending.