Acorio: Digital transformation was the top business initiative in 2021

Digital transformation grew 20% year-over-year, becoming the top business initiative in 2021 with 79% of organizations working on it, over service management, which was at only 64% this year, Acorio, an NTT Data company and ServiceNow consultancy, said in its third annual ServiceNow Insight and Vision survey.

The survey found that 60% of organizations have been working on their digital transformation initiatives for over a year, but only 14% are “almost complete” with their transformation.

While many organizations were slowly evolving towards transformation, the past 14 months have put the need for business digitization at a different level of strategic conversations. Digitization cuts across all industries and company sizes as every enterprise has been impacted in a variety of ways by the global health crisis and ensuing response.

Before COVID-19, many enterprises were incrementally improving parts of their businesses. We now see these same traditional enterprises were forced to rethink their technology into a more widespread strategy and execution in order to serve the new needs of their operations, employees, and customers.

The survey found that 26% of organizations have started implementing AI and machine learning since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a key focus of this survey, Acorio examined how businesses were using ServiceNow’s technology platform to underpin their initiatives in 2021. This year’s survey results reveal major platform growth amongst ServiceNow clients with 86% of companies using ServiceNow reporting implementations of two or more ServiceNow products, 63% companies reporting implementations three or more ServiceNow products, and 41% companies reporting implementations of four or more ServiceNow product in 2021. These numbers are significantly higher than the numbers reported in 2019, which were 54%, 27%, and 12%, respectively.

This first look Executive Summary comes from the largest global survey focused exclusively on ServiceNow and technology transformation. With nearly 500 responses, this year’s third annual report is Acorio’s largest study conducted to date. The responses were gathered anonymously via an online platform and come from a wide range of industries including healthcare, technology, and financial services. Of the respondents, 68% were from companies with more than 5,000 employees and 44% named themselves as directors or had higher job titles.

Read more in Acorio’s full ServiceNow Insight and Vision survey.