The New Zealand IT services ecosystem - it's all digital down here

New Zealand organisations are quickly identifying Digital Leadership teams to take the business forward. 

The foundation for the digital success of New Zealand (NZ) firms is largely attributed to a proactive role taken by NZ executives in establishing technology strategy and prioritising investment towards business outcomes.

IDC's fifteenth annual New Zealand IT Services Ecosystem Study revealed that 74% of local businesses already have their executive teams involved in shaping digital strategy. This signifies the early stage formation of an organisation's digital leadership team. This is critical for advancing an organisation's ability to compete in a digital economy.

“The Digital Leadership team of an organisation is starting to form. These roles differ from the traditional C-Suite, and are reflective of the future model of operations. These leaders can see the importance of strong digital governance and management through prioritisation and risk management,” says Adam Dodds, IDC's A/NZ Research Director for Channels, Alliances and Cloud Brokerage.

However, despite New Zealand excelling at adoption of digital in comparison to other countries in the APeJ region, when it comes to governance and management of "as a service" or outcome-based commercial models across the supply ecosystem, New Zealand CFOs are still playing catch up. This is important as the key to success in a Digital Economy is to offer such consumer services, solutions and products that can be used by organisations on demand basis.

Other key notable findings of the research included:

• A business focused prioritisation of investment in Information Management and Customer Centric based solutions. This will translate into a greater investment focus on integrating the data to create analytical insights, and thus achieve greater customer personalisation and business value.
• Hybrid / Multi-cloud has the highest overall market investment from a services perspective. New Zealand firms are highly aspirational in their intent to have optimised cloud strategies within 24 months which implies cloud first. This ambition is leading to a rise in the demand not only for tools to orchestrate hybrid and multi-cloud portfolios, but also for external professional services to migrate workloads and align with an "as-a-service" style of commercial terms.
• New Zealand organisations are becoming more aware of the provider capabilities as well as what service excellence should look like. With an eye to underpinning the needed level of digital change, most local firms show a preference for a multi-provider strategy with only 30% of the market favouring a single-provider sourcing strategy.

“New Zealand organisations are comfortable with multi-sourcing from a provider perspective. This means that consultancy-based discrete service providers are preferred over a single-provider strategy as it more comprehensively reflects organisations' unique requirements, their level of technical and digital maturity, and the areas of business they wish to fulfil internally,” concludes Dodds.