Digital Transformation: grand hero in Capri?

It is late at night and the last day of the grand annual EY Event in Capri. In this wonderful little island, top executives and key leaders of the Italian economy discussed challenges & opportunities for an Italian digital transformation. In this land, famous for its history and for its culture, leveraging a new culture of innovation may really represent the “magic recipe” to stimulate the much required growth, which we can create only working as a united ecosystem.

Investments in digital transformation will be in the order of trillions over the next decades and (as a minimum) they will represent half of the investments that the industrial and public world will perform in IT. Even higher will be the volumes of current non-IT spending which will translate into digital initiatives, as more and more companies become SW-centered and platforms conquer the entire world. Digital investment will propel new transformative technologies, staring with Artificial Intelligence and Cloud. Nevertheless, without the necessary skills we will not be able to create new businesses and jobs from this new ecosystem.  

As stated by Carlo Purassanta (CEO Microsoft Italy) during the Capri event, companies that invest in data management obtain significant results. According to a recent study, data-driven organizations achieve already today real and measurable benefits, including +18% gross margin and much higher employee productivity compared with less data-driven organizations. The digital transformation, therefore, offers a unique opportunity for organizations to compete in the new global scenario. The exploitation of information represents a true value differentiation, bringing immediate and direct benefits on business performance and productivity.

In Italy, digital transformation may even follow an evolutionary path, rather than just revolutionary. Intermingled with the Italian culture, it may follow a constant and continuous process that should see a combined effort on companies and public administration. This may be true, but it needs to happen really fast, given the delay we are seeing today and the accelerating pace of technology. Also, in Italy there is currently a dangerous lack of expertise in Digital, which represents a “fundamental” risk for any business and must be addressed as top priority both by the education and by the corporate worlds. 

Today we can connect everything, with sensors having increased battery life and having become incredibly cheap, as well as with cloud intelligence powered by astonishing machine learning capabilities. This is the new Internet of Things which combines the digital with the physical, from mixed customer journeys to mixed reality. A future which in the next years will revolutionize the way we work and live.

To conclude, the Digital Transformation we have seen in Capri is definitely ready for Italy, but Italians now need to be ready for the Digital Transformation! The time is now, and very soon the time may be late…

If you were with me in Capri during these days, or if you are just interested in Digital Transformation in Italy, I really look forward to reading your point of view!