Top Digital Performers More Confident About Future Success

May 20, 2013

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Data-driven | Digital | Mobile Phone

Apigee-Digital-Capabilities-Confidence-in-Future-May2013Executives at large companies (more than $500 million in revenues) who rate themselves highly in terms of their capability to use data analytics, deploy applications, and operate APIs are more likely than those who rate themselves poorly in those capabilities to have confidence in their future competitive position, according to [pdf] results from an Apigee Institute survey. These top digital performers also are more likely to report having outperformed their competitors in the past year across a range of factors, such as bringing new products to market and customer satisfaction. While correlation between digital capability and past and anticipated success certainly doesn’t mean there’s a causation, the researchers believe that “these findings warrant an urgent call to action.”

Apigee used data analytics, apps, and APIs as the bases for digital capability due to the rising influence of smartphones and tablets, with skill sets in each of these tools necessary in order to “create a virtuous cycle: delivering great experiences on any device, turning data about them into meaningful insight, and having the agility to quickly act on those insights for competitive advantage.”

Given that top digital performers are more confident about their future competitive positions, Apigee suggests that those performers will widen the gap with companies who are still developing the right capabilities. In order to progress towards those capabilities, the researchers recommend they benchmark their performance against the leaders, commit to these tools with intensity, and build alignment between marketing and IT.

About the Data: The data is based on a survey of 200 marketing and IT executives at companies with more than $500 million USD in annual revenue. The survey was conducted in partnership with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in April 2012. All respondents were director level or above; 55% were C-suite executives, presidents, CEOs, or board members.

To rank digital capabilities, Apigee describes its methodology as follows:

“Respondents rated their company’s current performance on a range of capabilities on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is very weak and 10 is very strong. We divided companies into quartiles based on the sum of their scores on three capabilities:

    • Using “big data” and analytics to enhance internal processes, existing products/services, or new offers;
    • Deploying apps such as mobile or tablet applications to employees, customers, or partners;
    • Operating APIs to make systems and data available for self-service access or mash-ups.

“Top Digital Performers” are the top quartile; the “Weakest Digital Performers” are the bottom quartile.

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