Education is the sector showing the most progress in advancing from a state of digital transformation to digital maturity.
Research by Coleman Parkes, commissioned by Ricoh Europe, reveals that more education leaders, 80%, see digital maturity as a key priority than representatives from other sectors. That compares with 78% for financial services, the same in the public sector and 73% in healthcare. They are also confident that they can reach digital maturity within the next two years, with 34% believing they will accomplish the move by 2016 and 71% expecting to achieve the goal by 2019.
“Digital maturity is one of the key factors that education institutions will use to attract new students,” says Jacques van Wyk, chief operating officer at Ricoh SA. “These institutions compete fiercely to attract top students and academics in their bid to publish qualified research that leads to grants and donations. Enhanced classroom and online learning experiences give them a competitive edge when they chase that goal.”
Twenty-three percent of education respondents see a stronger competitive edge as the number one benefit to becoming digitally mature – more than any other sector. Financial services came in at 19%, healthcare at 17% and the public sector at just 6%.
Other top-ranked benefits for the education sector include:
* Improved business processes (19%);
* Easier access to information (17%); and
* Less time required to complete tasks (12%).
However, the research highlights a number of hurdles on the road to digital maturity – where an organisation uses sophisticated tools to drive performance and demonstrates ongoing commitment to technology, technology-led initiatives, and digitally managed processes. Education leaders face both financial and cultural transformation challenges as they continue digital initiatives.
Forty-eight percent of respondents singled out cost as the greatest barrier to achieving digital maturity. This, perhaps, reflects the fact that the education sector is often subject to the greatest restraints on expenditure as it faces the daily need to balance limited budgets across investing in people, facilities and technology. In the February budget speech this year the South African government announced that 20% of the national budget, a sum of R254-billion, would go to education.
The Coleman-Parkes research found that 62% of senior teams in education are concerned with and interested in keeping operations digitally mature. However, the education sector also has one of the lowest percentages of respondents, 71%, who have a clear vision for achieving digital maturity. Only the public sector has fewer.
This lack of clarity may be down to a greater reliance on internal expertise than other sectors. The research reveals that education leaders are more likely to say that working with an expert external partner would be critical to achieving maturity.
Further hurdles illustrate the ongoing difficulties education leaders face in bringing a workforce with varying degrees of technology literacy into the digital age and the critical importance of leaders communicating a clear vision. Almost half, 48%, said that educating all business functions of the benefits of digital was an obstacle to achieving digital maturity, while 43% cited changing the way work is carried out to keep up with new technology already in place.
