Survey: digital agility remains weakness for majority of HK organisations

Over two-third of organisations (69%) in Hong Kong are still lagging in digital agility, whereas only 38% of APAC organisations are in the advanced stages of digital agility, according to the latest study of Workday.

Conducted in association with IDC, the IDC-Workday Digital Agility Index Asia/Pacific 2022 highlights the extent to which Asia Pacific (APAC) organisations have progressed in digital agility since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study found that across the nine APAC markets surveyed, progress in digital agility is uneven. In Hong Kong, only three in ten organisations (31%) are in the advanced stages of digital agility. Hong Kong ranked fifth in this year’s Digital Agility Index – a position it also held in 2020. The study also found that collaboration across departments was the biggest challenge for organisations in Hong Kong in pursuing digital transformation.

Organisations in Australia achieved greatest progress in digital transformation efforts and ranked first this year, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, and South Korea. Taiwan, a new addition to the study, came in sixth, followed by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.

From a regional perspective, only 38% of APAC organisations are in the advanced stages of digital agility. However, this figure reflects an 18 percentage point increase when compared to 2020. For the 62% of organisations in APAC lagging in digital agility (i.e. agility followers), technology adoption is often driven by functional requirements and business needs such as eCommerce, safety measures, and remote work during the pandemic.

The study also suggested that more organisations in Hong Kong can leverage unified solutions to enable seamless consolidation and reporting workflows for greater digital agility. However, 88% of Hong Kong organisations, HR and finance processes are disconnected, lacking a holistic view of resources.

For example, with rising inflation and interest rates, only 7% of finance professionals have automation capabilities in place to detect and predict potential financial disruptions. At the same time, 47% of IT professionals say that their organisations have monolithic architectures with tactical technology upgrades. For most organisations, this contributes to challenges in ensuring consistent integration across systems (43%), delivering higher digital resiliency (40%), and driving business agility (30%).

There are also opportunities for organisations in Hong Kong to pursue digital transformation more holistically to bring about better outcomes, especially in attracting and retaining talent.Only four in 10 (40%) of organisations in Hong Kong have enterprise talent systems and policies that maximise talent attraction and retention, while only three in ten of organisations (31%) manage talents by having a holistic strategy with employee engagement and data analytics to identify training needs and growth areas.

“Forward-thinking businesses that embrace digital agility and want to both attract and retain the best talent understand theneed for the right mix of operational change and technology,” said Daniel Cham, general manager for Workday Greater China. “In the intensifying war for talent, organisations must adopt a strategic approach to managing talent and ensure that the right technologies are in place to support and engage employees holistically. This will enable development of an agile workforce that is attuned to and embraces the organisation’s business transformation initiatives.”

“The unprecedented disruptions brought on by COVID-19 forced many organisations to fast-track their digital transformation. It is not surprising to see increased technology adoption driving agility improvement,” saidLawrence Cheok, associate research director of digital transformation at IDC. “However, true digital agilityis about capitalising on change to thrive. To do so, organisations need to emulate agility leaders and make the leap from tactical to enterprise-wide transformations in their culture, people, processes, and technology implementation.”

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