Thailand is the most digitally disrupted market in the region, with 95% of businesses and IT leaders in the country saying the market has been impacted, compared with an 80% average across the region, according to a CA Technologies study.
The Asia-Pacific & Japan (APJ) Digital Transformation Impact and Readiness Study, commissioned by CA Technologies, examined 900 business and IT leaders across nine APJ markets, including 100 respondents from Thailand, in late 2017.
Some 95% of respondents indicated their organisation has been affected today by digital disruption and most of them (98%) said their job has been changed by it. Thailand ranked the highest in APJ for these two aspects as well, scoring well above the APJ average of 78%.
In Thailand, digital transformation is in its early stages, said Nick Lim, vice-president for Asean and Greater China for CA Technologies. Only 44% of the respondents said they have digital transformation projects launched with clear corporate goals such as increasing productivity and increase revenue.
Some 17% said they have fully formed digital transformation initiatives, and 7% said they are fully digitalising their organisations.
"Digital transformation can disrupt the competition when it is approached holistically and used to create new products and services, improve customer service and even build different business models or revenue streams," Mr Lim said.
To succeed in today's digital economy, he said business and IT leaders have to be bold in harnessing disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation, data analytics and microservices, while ensuring that everyone in the organisation is aligned and working collaboratively towards a common goal.
According to the study, the biggest pressures for digital transformation in the region are meeting changing customer expectations, fast-evolving economic conditions and using digital transformation as a new lever in winning against traditional competitors.
This finding mirrors the top three business priorities that organisations in Thailand are focused on solving today, namely optimising operational efficiency, reducing operational costs and improving workforce collaboration.
The discrepancy between business priorities and the digital transformation drivers is particularly evident when it comes to customer experience. Although changing customer expectations is highlighted as the top pressure for digital transformation, improving customer experience is ranked fifth out of the seven priorities.
While organisations in Thailand still have a ways to go in terms of digital transformation readiness, one of the areas that Thai business and IT leaders are faring better than their APJ peers is their confidence in their organisation's IT capabilities to support digital transformation.
In fact, one in two respondents (51%) stated that their organisation has clearly laid out a road map and role that technology plays in the company's digital transformation vision, which is the highest percentage across the region.
CA Technologies proposed businesses remove digital transformation barriers with artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), the use of advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to analyse big data from various IT and business operations tools.
"The technology is able to speed up service delivery, increase efficiency of IT operations, and deliver an enhanced user experience," said Manivannan Govindan, director of DevOps at CA Technologies Asean. Citing Gartner, he said 40% of large enterprises will use AIOps by 2022.