<b>Vantage point:</b> Insights from cutting-edge research

A lever for professional equality between women and men

How have digital technologies transformed the place of women in the professional world? Do these technologies create new professional opportunities? Do they reduce inequalities in the workplace? These are a few of the questions that the global study — “Digital equality? Women in the digital revolution” — conducted by Roland Berger, Numa and La Journée de la Femme Digitale attempts to address. The study reveals that women expect a lot from digital in their professional lives. Nearly 60 per cent of women are certain that digital will help them progress professionally. About 73 per cent, both women and men, think that women have a specific part to play in the digital transformation of enterprises. Even though digital offers good prospects, 53 per cent of women think they do not have the same access as men to leadership positions, while 66 per cent of men are convinced of the opposite.

The study results are derived from an online survey of 3,000 people (men and women), conducted from October to December 2016 across more than 60 countries. Three topics were considered in the survey, corresponding to the key stages of women’s professional life: entry into working life, including entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, career development and access to leading positions.

Most Indian firms have not reached customer experience maturity

Epsilon, a digital marketing company, and global research firm Econsultancy have released the “Customer Experience Maturity” report. As part of the report, the two companies surveyed over 300 client-side (59 per cent of total respondents) and supply-side (41 per cent respondents) marketing, digital and e-commerce professionals based in India to explore the maturity level for customer experience (CX). According to the research results, nearly half of the client-side (48 per cent) and supply-side (47 per cent) respondents rate their companies as being “not very advanced” in their approach to customer experience.

While client-side respondents felt “complexity of customer experience” (28 per cent) was the biggest barrier preventing their organisations from improving the customer experience, supply-side respondents identified “lack of overall strategy” (44 per cent) as the primary hindrance. The majority of respondents felt that optimising internal collaboration between multi-disciplined teams and using data to better understand behaviours were the most important factors to deliver a great customer experience over the coming year.

Digital biz initiatives expected to drive seven per cent growth in 2017

The worldwide application integration and middleware (AIM) software market continues to grow faster than the overall infrastructure software market, with revenue on pace to surpass $27 billion in 2017, an increase of seven per cent from 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. Growth in mobile, big data, analytics, in-memory computing, cloud and the Internet of Things initiatives is associated with digital business and requires application and integration professionals to invest in new AIM technologies. This, in turn, drives fresh integration approaches with new AIM technologies at their core, such as application programmable interface management and integration platform as a service. Three main requirements are central to this shift. Firstly, digital firms need an open, flexible and lightweight model that enables simpler and faster configuration and deployment of both cloud and on-premises resources. In addition, they need platforms that support diverse combinations of resources, applications, data, processes and things from within and outside the organisation. Finally, they need self-service middleware that can increase and decrease in scale rapidly.