Organisations driving forward with digitisation are achieving significant gains from modest additional expenditure.
According to Tibco CEO Murray Rode (pictured), digital leaders (those in the top quartile) are enjoying five times the revenue growth, eight times the EBIT growth, and twice the growth in return to shareholders compared with the laggards in the bottom quartile.
"There's clearly tangible business benefits" from digitisation, he said.
But these benefits are not being obtained at high cost: IT is 3.5% of the leaders' expenditure compared with 3.2% for laggards.
So it's not so much about how much you spend, but what you do and how you do it, Rode suggested.
Leaders focus on new connected products, he said, they put the customer experience first, and they use "data as fuel" to drive real-time responses.
Consequently they need to make a lot of ongoing decisions about their technology investments.
And as Tibco CTO and executive vice president of products and technology Matt Quinn observed, an organisation's IT department is no longer its sole provider of IT, so the need to be able to interconnect everything is even more important. "Keeping current with interconnection is very important," he said.
Australian CIOs are working to make sense of data and to use it to better interact with internal departments and external partners, said Tibco Asia Pacific CTO Robert Merlicek told iTWire, but they are a little behind because their focus is still on mining repositories rather than seeking to understand the data.
Disclosure: The writer attended Tibco Now 2017 Singapore as a guest of the company.