Digital transformation of enterprises in Poland A.D. 2023
Digitalisation is now a phenomenon that encompasses almost every aspect of the lives and operations of both consumers and businesses. Particularly for the latter, digital transformation has a huge impact not only on the image of a company (compared to its competitors), but above all on developing the business and making it more resistant and flexible.
There are many specific objectives that can be achieved through investment in IT solutions and in digital transformation in general. In the PMR survey, more than 600 entities were asked about the relevance of the selected objectives alongside their time horizon.
Cost, efficiency and infrastructure objectives
According to this year›s PMR survey, just under 50% of companies in Poland indicated both a reduction in total costs and an increase in employee productivity among the goals already achieved or invested in. The last few years may have contributed to this, which, due to the disruption of the supply chain caused initially by the pandemic and then also by the war in Ukraine and the general geopolitical situation, forced businesses to change their cost policy and to intensify operations by, among other things, increasing employee productivity. These two objectives were also mentioned by 26% of companies each as being important to achieve in the current year, which may in turn be due to the tangible decline in consumption.
In turn, the distribution of respondents indications was slightly different for the two remaining objectives in the area covered. Reduction of IT infrastructure costs as well as reduction of technology debt and related costs were performed by 34% and 35% of companies, respectively. Thus, as the results of the survey show, the reduction of these costs did not operate in the area of a company s activities as much as an overall cost reduction. In addition, for more than a quarter of companies, reducing these costs is not an important objective at present. In the case of technology debt it is, in turn, an irrelevant goal for 27% of companies. This could be due to at least two factors. Firstly, the phasing out of older solutions in favour of new ones has already been carried out,
and the reduction of proprietary infrastructure took place along with, for example, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondly, companies may see the need for reductions in other areas as a higher priority.
Use of tools supporting IT departments and developers
A survey conducted by PMR shows that 36% of companies are already using solutions that automate the work of IT departments in terms of monitoring and management. Therefore, it already appears to be quite a common solution, but its even greater popularity is reflected in the responses of 30% of the companies surveyed who indicated a plan to implement it this year. This is consistent with a trend developing in the industry, where increasing significance is being attached to effective infrastructure management.
The largest proportion of the respondents neither use nor plan to use solutions for rapid development of business applications (low-code) – this answer was indicated by 39% of the companies surveyed. This could be due to both low awareness and the low availability of this type of solutions. However, low-code tools are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and the benefits associated with them are likely to generate increasing interest in these solutions. This is because in a low-code environment, developers can use ready-made components, libraries and modules that are available within the platform (instead of writing code from scratch, it is possible to use a graphical interface or drag-and-drop tools), which allows rapid prototyping, easy iteration and adaptation of the application to changing business needs. This seems to be recognised by 20% of the companies surveyed who are already using these solutions and a further 20% who plan to introduce them this year. Looking ahead to the next few years, low-code is in the implementation plans of a further 20% of companies.
Another solution that companies were asked about in the PMR survey concerned integration and microservices. The ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) provides mechanisms and tools to transform and exchange data between applications regardless of their diversity. More than a quarter of the companies participating in the survey declared using such solutions, and a total of 40% plan to introduce them. These results suggest significant interest in this type of solutions.
PMR index: digital transformation
According to the PMR index, measuring the advancement of digital transformation, the highest level of digitalisation can be observed in the telecommunications industry. At a similar level of sophistication are most companies in retail and wholesale trade as well as machinery and equipment manufacturing. The least fulfilled objectives, as asked in the survey, fall into the construction and utilities industries. They come out as the most conservative in terms of the goals possible to achieve through digital transformation.
However, it is not only in these industries that there are groups of companies not planning at all to achieve the goals supported by digital transformation and IT investment. The conclusion that can be drawn from the data cited is that some of the companies less convinced by digital transformation may soon be persuaded by their competitors, who may already be elsewhere on the transformation road.
More data on the Polish digital transformation market can be found in the report:
The material uses data from a survey of companies carried out by PMR in Q1 2023 using the computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) technique. The survey was conducted on a sample of over 600 companies (SMEs and large companies). It covered the population of companies based on the primary code according to the Polish Classification of Business Activity (PKD). The subjects of the study comprised digital transformation, cybersecurity, cloud and data centre solutions.
A comprehensive analysis of the digital transformation and the full results of the survey will be published in a PMR report dedicated to the topic. The report will be published in Q4 2023.
Index
The index was prepared on the basis of responses provided by 611 companies representing various sectors of the economy. The question focused on the use of 20 specific solutions within the company, ranging from basic remote working tools to systems supporting the management of different areas of the business, AI, big data and advanced data analytics.
Each response option was then assigned the following numbers (the higher, the more the use of the solution is implemented/close to implementation):
- We already use it = 100
- We do not use it, but plan to do so this year = 60
- We do not use it, but plan to do so within 2-3 years = 40
- We do not use it, but plan to do so within 4+ years = 20
- We neither use it nor consider it/it is not included in our plans = 0
- I do not know/it is hard to say = 0
The areas thus assessed were then divided to obtain an average, which was brought down to an index range from 0 to 100. The index value for the total companies was 50.5.
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