Technology spending in the next two years will continue to grow faster in India than elsewhere in Asia Pacific — indicating good times for CIOs.
Government policies like the cashless economy, the push toward digital, and regulatory reforms will encourage growth in tech spending.
Market research firm Forrester says total tech spending excluding telecommunications will grow 12 percent year-on-year in 2017 in rupee terms, at the same pace as in 2016. Growth will increase to 13 percent in 2018.
This is due to the largely positive economic outlook that India is likely to enjoy over the next three to five years.
Forrester says enterprise CIOs should build digital transformation around customers and revenue growth.
Digital transformation investments are ultimately about business survival through disruption. Tech investments directly affect customer expectations and go beyond the traditional ROI, as the real value is long-term revenue growth. The scope for disruption spans the entire customer life cycle, affecting everything from the supply chain to after-sales support.
IDC forecasts that mobility spending would grow 2.6 percent to $1.57 trillion in 2017. Purchases of mobile hardware, software, and services is expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 2.1 percent over the 2015-2020 forecast period and reaching $1.67 trillion in 2020.
Therefore, CIOs will need to strike a balance between making business technology (BT) investments and overhauling operational technology to support changing regulations in an increasingly digital economy.
CIOs in India should not miss the opportunity to negotiate a better tech budget and deliver on initiatives that take advantage of these conditions. Now is the time to convince the CEO to invest in digital transformation, both digital CX and digital operational excellence.
CIOs should take the following steps:
# Prioritize and coordinate digital CX initiatives across functions. Indian enterprises are moving from a strategy focused on customer acquisition to one focused on customer experience.
This means that every enterprise function beyond sales and marketing will need to spend on customer focused initiatives. You need to ensure that this money is spent wisely across functions in coordinated initiatives, taking care of dependencies.
# Enterprises in India are investing in automated solutions based on digital technologies such as IoT to monitor and manage, and optimize operations ranging from factories to logistics, field offices, and infrastructure.
Indian CIOs can start with solutions to monitor operational activities and enhance their maturity in the future to incorporate actions supported by analytics and artificial intelligence.
# Firms are utilizing cloud-based platforms and applications for modernization initiatives.
This is the best time for CIOs to invest in efforts that enable you to leverage global public cloud providers and a host of local and global software-as-a-service solutions to optimize existing legacy applications and convert capital expenditures to operating expenditures.
