Digital maturity of key domains in Europe for uptake of Digital Transformation

On 3 March 2022, IDC organised the webinar "Digital maturity of key domains in Europe for uptake of Digital Transformation" within the scope of OPEN-DEI project. The event was open to different types of stakeholders and aimed at providing an overview of digital maturity of key domains in Europe including manufacturing, energy, healthcare and agrifood through presenting the analysis conducted by IDC for the European Commission. Thus, it aimed to support the supply market (including digital platforms providers)  to have a concrete overview of the target market in terms of digital readiness to uptake the platforms.

Giorgio Micheletti opened the event by providing an overview of OPEN DEI project and a bif picture of advanced technologies and digital platforms. A key message was that the “platform revolution” will eventually reshape how industries are defined, how ecosystem participants interact, how stakeholders’ needs are met, and how value is created and shared.

Luca Butiniello presented the results of the analysis of key maturity index across different European domains. According to the results, In 2020-2021 Telecom/Media, Manufacturing, Finance and Professional services were the top sectors by digital maturity. It was also highlighted that the pandemic crisis showed organizations the crucial role of technology. As one of the few allies to cope and even thrive during hard times, those organizations that were lagging in terms of digital innovation had to accelerate their roadmap, while those who where already ahead of the journey, focused on digitization even more, to seize opportunities not available before. He also addressed the relevance of digital platforms for digital maturity highlighting the point that as new technologies gain their ground, European organizations will allocate more resources to discover new scenarios and applications. While some technologies are already quite widespread across industries, thanks to their versatility and latest improvement, others still have to be contextualized in different industries. Here, the role of digital ecosystem and digital platforms will be crucial to support organizations towards the new digital horizons we highlighted before.

Eventually Golboo Pourabdollahian presented the main adoption barriers for digital platforms considering that the nature of digital platforms (as the orchestrators of digital ecosystem) and the consequent barriers to their adoption are heavily dependent on the maturity of the companies in the market. According to her, the adoption barriers for digital platform adoption can be categorised into 4 main categories: regulatory barriers, economic efficiency barriers, technology barriers and business model and organizational barriers. While regulatory barriers refer to the perceived lack of appropriate, trusted platforms that address mutual trust and transparency, the economic efficiency barrier includes the significant gap between SMEs and large enterprises in Europe in terms of access and usage of digital technologies. The technology barriers, according to her, are mainly related to lack of interoperability and challenges for cloud-platform adoption, while the organisation barriers include lack of concrete business models, governance models and also cultural barriers.

The event was concluded by a Q&A session where the comments and questions were discussed from the participants.