The IDC Future Enterprise Awards Categories

Best in Future of Connectedness

This award recognizes the organization that has transformed and digitalized processes to ensure employees (people), things (systems, devices), applications, and processes connect to enable the seamless flow of data and drive business outcomes. This transformation should highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, collaborative work environments, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• An enterprise wide imperative with a single digital strategy in place with established implementation roadmaps, which the organization is using to ensure digital would be embedded across the business.
• Resoluteness to make the required organizational and cultural changes across the entire organization in the areas of culture, data, customer experience, operations, and work.
• A long-term investment strategy based on the principle that digital is inherently valuable to the business.
• A single digital platform to scale technology innovations, focused on enabling digital capabilities at speed, scale, and agility.

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Best in Future of Customer Experience

This award recognizes the organization that is able to rethink and effectively transform the way customer-related initiatives are done in the organization (e.g., customer engagement, customer experience, customer service). The Future of Customer Experience (FoCX) is characterized by the changing and shifting nature of the relationship between customers and brands through a lens or prism of technology. IDC has defined the FoCX as an empathetic relationship between customers and brands built on what the customer wants and how they want to be treated through the technology lens of awareness, engaging, learning, and, measuring.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• Ability to attain predictable communications with customers. Communication is the foundation for every interaction and every engagement between a brand and a customer during all steps of the customer journey, and the key is that it is predictable for the customer and for the brand.
• Ability to deliver lifetime value. Delivering lifetime value requires an organization to ensure the product or service is directly tied to the experience the customer receives.
• Ability to leverage applied intelligence. Intelligence about the customer, the market, and the world that can then be used to customize and hyper-personalize the experience for the customer.
• Ability to engender mutual trust. The customer wants to be able to trust a company with their data.

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Best in Future of Digital Infrastructure

This award recognizes that digital infrastructure provides the platform for agile business using dedicated and public cloud compute, storage, network, edge, management, automation, and lifecycle services to help the business scale, adapt, and compete in a software and data intensive world. This award recognizes the organization that is leading the use of digital infrastructure to transform their business, engage customers and employees, and accelerate business innovation.

The winner of this category must demonstrate that their organization has any one or more of the following attributes:

• AI Ready Infrastructure – best in class investments in designing and implementing digital infrastructure strategies to accommodate emerging business priorities enabled by data intensive workloads, particularly for AI use cases.
• Autonomous Operations – best in class use of infrastructure automation, observability and analytics, including AIOps to transformation operations, improve security and modernize the IT Ops workforce.
• Hybrid & Multicloud Interoperability - Best in class use of interoperable public cloud services and/or dedicated cloud infrastructure platforms and unified management approaches to transform business capabilities and deliver on top priority business outcomes.
• Edge Optimized – best in class infrastructure deployments that extend digital enterprise business capabilities, remote infrastructure support and automated data management across edge locations including work from home and mobile devices as well as factory, lab and retail locations.
• Center of Excellence Governance – best in class use of collaborative policy-led decision making approaches to align digital infrastructure investments, FinOps, sustainability strategies, and operating models that reflect the shared views of IT, Cloud, Data, DevOps and LOB stakeholders.

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Best in Future of Enterprise Intelligence

This award recognizes the organization that has made impactful positive changes to their enterprise intelligence by innovating around how they synthesize information, how they learn from these insights and share those learnings across the organization, how they deliver insights at scale, and how they develop and promote a data culture.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following competency areas:

• Overall Future of Enterprise Intelligence
• Information Synthesis. This is the process of taking discrete, objective raw facts about people, places, things, and other entities and organizing them for some useful purpose, usually by the addition of some context.
• Collective Learning. This refers to the awareness about and understanding of the relationships among various pieces of information and previously developed knowledge, and their application to a particular problem. This capacity to learn affects both humans and machines as organizations will systematically convert tacit knowledge in people’s heads into explicit knowledge in systems and then to expose it across the enterprise.
• Insights Delivery. Delivering insights at scale means providing actionable decision support and decision automation functionality for everyone in the enterprise, from executives and managers to analysts and frontline workers (and machines), embedded in their daily work flows. Enterprises will thereby ensure delivery of insights at scale by surfacing actionable information to all users (human or machines).
• Data culture. These organizations have excelled in building a culture around being data-driven. They have demonstrated commitment to improving data literacy and data culture in people, have a stated vision that includes data, have quantified and tracked measurable goals around use of data, and have encouraged data-related collaboration across all levels of the organization.

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Best in Future of Industry Ecosystems

The future of industry ecosystems is open, dynamic, and shared, evolving like a biological ecosystem that changes in response to pressure, competition, or disruption. Businesses that consider their ecosystem an expansive set of building blocks and are driven by the opportunity to better deliver values, outcomes, and experiences to individuals and industry ecosystem participants will be able to adjust to meet market change or opportunity as required, much in the same way nature finds a way to adapt. For instance, to mitigate market disruptions, Company X starts to rely on its ecosystem players and partners, while leveraging technologies that allow it to understand the horizon and flex its offerings to stay relevant to the changing consumer needs and requirements.

This award recognizes the organization’s ability to generate value by its participation in a new digital economy. New business models will emerge, maybe driven by new customer requirements and ways of operating, that will spur the creation of innovative, digital ecosystems that leverage software platforms to deliver scale and speed.

The winner of this category must demonstrate at least one of the following:

• Ability to seamlessly engage with ecosystem partners utilizing technology such as platforms, APIs, collaboration tools
• Ability to develop and deliver personalized products, services, experiences.
• Ability to continuously innovate across the ecosystem (products, services, experiences, processes)
• Ability to optimize across the ecosystem (resource/capability)
• Ability to enable traceability across the entire ecosystem (end-to-end reporting in e.g., sustainability)

The organization must demonstrate that their industry ecosystem works on at least 2 of 3 shared initiatives as defined above: shared data & insights, shared applications, shared operations & expertise. The industry ecosystem must be in business for a minimum of 6 months.

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Best in Future of Operations

This award recognizes the future enterprise that is able to rethink the way operations is managed. It is a fundamental shift in the operations model to one that fosters data-driven resilient decision making in the context of the enterprise, and supports operational strategies that are designed to support increased operational agility and resilience rather than centrally focused on delivering efficiency above all else. Operational transformation is critical for effectively scaling digital transformation initiatives.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• Ability to enable resilient decision making within operations, coupling the operational strategies and decision making with the decisions, processes and insight.
• The development of the digital engineering function, bringing together capabilities across IT and data science within a central function within operations to support the secure management of operational data stream, integration of operational and enterprise data, and management of the required platform environment. Central to this capability will be creation of centralized monitoring, diagnostics, and control capabilities, at the core of which will increasingly focused digital twin capabilities and systems.
• A decentralized and distributed technology architecture, bringing together cloud based systems, edge computing capabilities, IoT, and AI/ML to enable agile and adaptive decision making.

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Best in Future of Trust

This award recognizes the organization that can maintain the trust amid the evolving needs of its customers. The role of IT in maintaining the trust of customers and other stakeholders in their enterprises has historically centered on preventing cyberattacks and data breaches while helping business leaders achieve regulatory compliance. As the digital transformation age unfolds, however, many are pursuing initiatives focused on customer experiences and empathy at scale, enterprise and ecosystem intelligence, smart and autonomous devices, and other efforts that introduce new trust threats, challenges, and opportunities.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the ability to create and implement strategies and structured approaches to building trust through at least one of the following:

• Effective risk assessment (visibility) and management
• Regulatory compliance
• Security management
• Promoting privacy
• Ethics, and social responsibility
• Transparency (good governance)

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Best in Future of Work

This award recognizes the organization that rethinks the way works get done. The Future of Work is a fundamental shift in the work model to one that fosters human-machine collaboration, enables new skills and worker experiences, and supports a secure location- and device-agnostic virtual workspace and reimagined physical workplace. Work transformation is critical for effectively scaling digital transformation initiatives.

The winner of this category must demonstrate at least one of the following:

• Adopting “digital worker” technologies (i.e., AI, robotics, process automation, AR/VR), fostering human-machine collaboration. Human workers operate side by side with “digital co-workers,” augmenting human capabilities.
• Enabling a work culture that encourages continuous innovation and a new type of organizational agility; has outcome-focused leadership style and culture that shows empathy, empowerment, frictionless engagement, and speed; deploys digital technology to offer upskilling/reskilling and career development opportunities to all employees.
• A work environment that offers all workers secure access to required corporate resources (data, applications, co-workers) and supports collaboration with trust at the core. Corporate facilities leverage digital technology to foster collaboration across physical and digital boundaries and create a safe and healthy environment.

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Future Enterprise of the Year

This award recognizes the organization which is working towards becoming a Future Enterprise to lead in the digital-first world. A Future Enterprise is a digitally determined organization where digital is achieved at a scale across its operations; innovating at a pace that is an order of magnitude greater than traditional businesses. It is driven by a customer-centric and empowered workforce that embraces experimentation and risk-taking as it seeks to continuously improve its products, services, and experiences. Technology and data are its lifeblood, fueling more efficient operations, new revenue streams, and heightened customer loyalty. To put simply, the Future Enterprise is the gold standard of how organizations must organize and invest to participate in digital-first markets.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• An enterprise wide imperative with a single digital strategy in place with established implementation roadmaps, which the organization is using to ensure digital would be embedded across the business.
• Resoluteness to make the required organizational and cultural changes across the entire organization in the areas of culture, data, customer experience, operations, and work.
• A long-term investment strategy based on the principle that digital is inherently valuable to the business.
• A single digital platform to scale technology innovations, focused on enabling digital capabilities at speed, scale, and agility.

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Special Award for Digital Innovation

This award recognizes that the modern enterprise must transform itself from a software consumer into a large-scale software innovator. A winning organization shows that a project or initiative can source, augment, develop and/or distribute software IP (intellectual property) that delivers differentiation, disrupts the market through external products or services, or has significant positive impact on internal operations.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• Planning. The nominated project is tied to and driven by business goals from the earliest ad-hoc stages.
• Sourcing. Rather than comprising solely top-to-bottom internally created resources, the nominated project relies also on external code, libraries, apps, algorithms, microservices, platforms, and so on.
• Development. The nominated project makes use of agile and secure, full-cycle DevOps practices and methodologies, allowing for rapid release and pivoting based on market intelligence and customer/user feedback.
• Distribution. The nominated project makes full use of third-party development delivery ecosystems (e.g., downloads or API access from the organization’s website would constitute distribution). Please note that distribution can also be internal only (i.e., first party distribution) where it is used in your own products/services and/or business processes.

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Special Award for Digital Native Business

This award recognizes Digital Native Business (DNB) organizations – start-ups, scale-ups, and Unicorns – that have made significant breakthroughs in the marketplace, disrupting and transforming markets and industries through the creation of highly innovative and competitive products, services, or business models to compete in the digital-first world. DNBs are characterized by having a digital-first approach and tech-driven operating models. They aggressively leverage new and emerging technologies, platform services, and marketplaces, and adopt an ecosystem-centric approach to drive higher levels of customer experiences (CX) and market differentiation. DNBs grow and scale fast, disrupting industries and creating new markets.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• A companywide digital innovation strategy focused on creating and/or delivering transformative/innovative products and services to the marketplace, and attaining sustainable and resilient business growth.
• An agile and financially viable business model with robust product-market-fit that employs data-driven insights and tools for rapid testing, and ongoing validation, allowing the organization to effectively adjust to changing market conditions and to support exponential and sustainable growth.
• An agile governance framework that leverages outcome-based metrics and allows the organization to support its rapid evolution from growth and scale to profitability – effectively addressing its evolving needs across people, processes, and technologies.
• A digital platform or a flexible and adaptive technology architecture built on new and emerging technologies that allow the organization to rapidly pivot with minimum impact to its business growth and that can effectively support the company’s cycles of growth and expansion – from rapid experimentation, effective testing, scale and ultimately profitability.

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Special Award for Digital Resiliency

This award recognizes organizations which have demonstrated digital resiliency. IDC has defined Digital Resiliency as the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging its digital capabilities to not only restore business operations, but also capitalize on the changed conditions to ensure future success in the next normal. This definition includes business resiliency but goes much further in its emphasis of the distinctive role of digital technology and also the need to go beyond mere survival and continuation of the status quo. The pandemic revealed that some digitally advanced companies were not only able to continue to operate effectively but were quickly able to pivot their business either to new customer segments, or delivery of new digital services to support growth.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• Leadership & Organization Resiliency. A digitally resilient organization must demonstrate business leadership and the CIO office working in tandem with the rest of the organization to mitigate business and digital technology weaknesses across dimensions, understanding the interdependencies and pulling them together and leveraging dimensional strengths for future success.
• Workforce Resiliency. A digitally resilient organization focuses on optimizing the employee experience in times of extreme uncertainty, covering issues such as employee engagement and productivity, retention and onboarding, skills, and learning, as well as health and wellness.
• Customers & Ecosystem Resiliency. A digitally resilient organization focuses on customer, supplier, and partner engagements and how to develop, retain, renew, and optimize these relationships in a time of crisis.
• Brand & Reputation Resiliency. A digitally resilient organization must be able to develop trust in the enterprise’s brand for customers, partners, and suppliers, where an enterprise’s response to crises is a measure of the quality and integrity of an organization and its leadership.
• Financial Resiliency. A digitally resilient organization shows ability to learn from the past to predict potential future financial threats, and its ability to help the business and the broader ecosystem to respond effectively to new threats and opportunities.
• Operational Resiliency. A digitally resilient organization focuses on safeguarding and maintaining operational ‘business as usual’ using techniques such as business continuity planning and disaster recovery and uses agile and adaptive planning techniques to build incremental and opportunistic responses to operational problems because of both internal challenges and external/ecosystem dynamics.

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Special Award for Sustainability

This award recognizes the organization that demonstrates the commitment to embed sustainability within the business. This organization aims to address sustainability in a holistic manner, where the goal is for sustainability to become an integral part of the overall business strategy as its underlying foundation. IDC believes that purpose-driven sustainability can deliver long-term impact to any organization and its strategy, operations, employees, customers, and ultimately, bring new innovations into the market it serves.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• Early successes in its sustainability initiatives, fostering greater commitment to a purpose-driven strategy
• Commitment to embed sustainability goals in enterprisewide business objectives and solve society’s ‘wicked’ problems faced by organizations in the region through long-term, sustainable innovation.
• Ability to derive business value from current and future investments supporting sustainability goals
• Ability to integrate digital transformation and other technology investments with sustainability goals, setting the foundation for sustainable innovation

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Special Award for Smart Cities – Best in Citizen Wellbeing

This award recognizes the town/city/county/province/government entity that is able to rethink and effectively transform citizen wellbeing initiatives (e.g., citizen engagement, citizen experience, citizen service). Citizen wellbeing is characterized by the changing and shifting nature of the relationship between citizens and Government organizations through a lens or prism of technology.

Citizen wellbeing refers to enhanced citizen engagement in a smart city environment resulting in increased access to healthcare, availability of a seamless education system, and reduced digital divide enabling increased access to government services to citizens irrespective of their location

The winner of this category must demonstrate enhancing citizen experience through at least one of the following areas:

• Ability to provide an efficient healthcare system that not only enables citizens to access care seamlessly, but also able to capture clinical data, for advanced analytics for public health management and future pandemic outbreak management.
• Ability to extend effective learning management systems across K12 and tertiary levels to make the education system more flexible and seamless./Pacific region through long-term, sustainable innovation
• Ability to enhance digital equity across multi-pronged services, especially for underserved communities.

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Special Award for Smart Cities – Best in Connected City

This award recognizes the Government organization that has transformed and digitalized their states/cities/provinces to enhance the lives of citizens, ultimately resulting in progressive societal outcomes. Such smart city transformations highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.

Connected cities, as part of the Smart Cities initiative, aim to interconnect various citizen-services aspects, supported with related infrastructure, harnessing the power of technologies, to result in citizen experience enhancement.

The winner of this category must demonstrate at least one of the following:

• Performance and/or operational benefits from citizen-centric solutions that improve human-human and human-machine interactions.
• A scalable, secure smart city environment that allows access anytime, anywhere, and that delivers pervasive experiences using connectivity and/or networking solutions that benefit citizens, such as Intelligent transportation, and smart water.
• A connected environment that is intelligent, dynamic, and secure, enabling access to public resources and supporting collaboration with an agile and dynamic approach such as Data-driven policing and Next Generation Emergency services
• A pervasive and reliable connectivity strategy that allows the Government organization to be resilient in light of disruptive events including cyberattacks, pandemics, and natural disasters.

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Special Award for Smart Cities – Best in Digital Policies

This award recognizes the Government organization that has transformed and digitalized their states/cities/provinces to enhance the lives of citizens, ultimately resulting in societal outcomes. Such smart city transformations highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.

Digital policies in a smart city environment refer to the regulatory aspects that shape and control the administrative functions enabling the deployment of various services, through digital platforms. Such system of approach, with strict adherence to compliance, brings better administrative control for efficient civic engagements that in turn lead to more inclusive societal and economic development.

The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:

• Ability to plan and deploy digital smart city platforms for the effective administration of civic engagements, enabling cross-collaboration through seamless and secure data sharing.
• Ability to better engage citizens and communities, while maintaining transparency with regards to the regulations/policies ensuring data privacy and security, leading to efficient e-Governance practice.
• Ability to deploy digital services, ultimately enabling citizen/community engagement, in turn leading to economic development.

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CEO of the Year

This award recognizes the CEO who has developed a strategy to create a future enterprise. This CEO’s vision follows an agenda for the digital-first world, responding to new customer requirements, capabilities, critical infrastructure, and industry ecosystems. This CEO is an excellent storyteller and is successful in delivering this message to the rest of the organization. They continuously stress the need for a digital enterprise as part of overall brand and strategy in response to the needs of a digital-first world. Their vision includes working with partners within the ecosystem to develop new products, services, and experiences, built by a digitally capable and empowered workforce in a data-driven organization. The CEO also ensures that organization is equipped to take on the challenges of the digital-first world: striking a balance between business agility and innovation, managing risk and security, and cultivating sustainability within the business. The winner of this category must be the CEO of the entire business/group, and not just a division or department. They may also hold a Managing Director position for the region.

The CEO of the year:

• Defines the organization’s value, role, and partners in the digital-first world
• Ensures critical infrastructure is in place to successfully deliver reliable digital services and pervasive experiences while managing risk and security
• Focuses on creating empathy with customers at scale and engenders trust with customers, pivoting operations from throughput and efficiency to market-driven
• Grows the enterprise into an intelligent organization by creating a dynamic work model to deliver innovative services and experiences at scale

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CIO/CDO of the Year

This award recognizes the CIO/CDO who has played a determining role in setting the vision and responsible for the execution of digital transformation (DX) within an organization. Traditionally, the CIO/CDO would have the authority in making key decisions such as project focus, vendor selection, budget approvals, the KPIs at which the project is measured against, etc. The CIO/CDO of the Year would be the role model within their organization on how they manage the continuous transition from old to new tech and experimental to operational in the context of DX, empower their employees, and enable and integrate innovations.

In the digital-first world, many applications of technology will not go back to the way they were. In addition to growing attention on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues, aspects of digital risk and impact on competitive differentiators are growing conversations in nearly every boardroom. As a result, these leaders are in the unique position to influence the business direction of their enterprise. In this regard, IDC is recognizing today’s fast-tracked CIOs/CDOs who are boldly leading their organization’s DX by responding to the needs of a digital-first world.

The winner of this category must be able to:

• Enact a digital strategy to the organization’s existing systems. Improve operations by integrating enterprise performance management, application portfolio management, and program/project management practices in real time.
• Refine and integrate business and IT processes. Automate repetitive manual processes and touchpoints via RPA, self-service, APIs, microservices, and containers.
• Elevate customer and employee experience. Augment personalization and engagement through data analytics, customer intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, and conversational platforms among others.
• Create connected digital ecosystems. Rethink enterprise architecture by making nonredundant resiliency a priority and redesigning legacy platforms.
• Focus on digital innovation delivery. Evolve and develop software capabilities through increasing the use of low-code or no-code, externally available code libraries, and Agile/DevOps methodologies.
• Devise information-based product lines and services extension. Accelerate business model disruption and use evidence-based success metrics to boost the organization’s digitization plan.

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DX Leader of the Year

This award recognizes the DX Leader who has played a determining role in setting the vision and responsible for the execution of digital transformation (DX) within an organization. Traditionally, the DX Leader would have the authority in making key decisions such as project focus, vendor selection, budget approvals, the KPIs at which the project is measured against, etc. The DX Leader would be the role model within their organization on how they manage the continuous transition from old to new tech and experimental to operational in the context of DX, empower their employees, and enable and integrate innovations.

In the digital-first world, many applications of technology will not go back to the way they were. In addition to growing attention on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues, aspects of digital risk and impact on competitive differentiators are growing conversations in nearly every boardroom. As a result, these leaders are in the unique position to influence the business direction of their enterprise. In this regard, IDC is recognizing today’s fast-tracked DX Leaders who are boldly leading their organization’s DX by responding to the needs of a digital-first world.

Note: The DX Leader category in Turkey is known as the CIO/CDO of the Year category in other regions.

The winner of this category must be able to:

• Enact a digital strategy to the organization’s existing systems. Improve operations by integrating enterprise performance management, application portfolio management, and program/project management practices in real time.
• Refine and integrate business and IT processes. Automate repetitive manual processes and touchpoints via RPA, self-service, APIs, microservices, and containers.
• Elevate customer and employee experience. Augment personalization and engagement through data analytics, customer intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, and conversational platforms among others.
• Create connected digital ecosystems. Rethink enterprise architecture by making nonredundant resiliency a priority and redesigning legacy platforms.
• Focus on digital innovation delivery. Evolve and develop software capabilities through increasing the use of low-code or no-code, externally available code libraries, and Agile/DevOps methodologies.
• Devise information-based product lines and services extension. Accelerate business model disruption and use evidence-based success metrics to boost the organization’s digitization plan.

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