Executives cite Customer Demand, Technology as Top Reasons they are Changing their Business Models

  Increasing and more sophisticated customer demands are forcing companies to adopt new business models and deploy advanced technologies to help improve productivity and better leverage financial resources, a new survey from audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP indicates.

“With the changing customer dynamic, CFOs and CIOs want the most strategic technologies to better manage the back office and the broader workforce in order to maintain margins in product or service delivery,” said Stephen G. Hasty, a KPMG partner and U.S. Innovation Leader for Advisory, who leads the firm’s Transformation initiative.

“Technology that is geared to help drive performance in support of a customer-centric focus is taking center stage,” Hasty said. “In fact, more and more company leaders see that emerging IT advancements can drive business improvements to help them grow their business and maintain a competitive posture in the market, even amid rising costs for raw materials and narrowing margins for products.”

Thirty-three percent of KPMG survey respondents said customer demand was the most common trigger for transforming their business model, while technology and domestic competition were tied for second (30 percent each), said the executives who could select more than one “trigger” in responding to the KPMG survey.

Hasty says that customer demands can range from wanting mobile access to be able to shop and pay for products and services, to expectations of better product quality and improved access to customer-service questions. The evolving C-suite link has CIOs scouring the increasingly crowded and complex technology landscape for the right solution to help operations meet those demands, while also helping the CFO oversee and measure how the organization can best make investments, improve performance, remain competitive and help drive growth.

Respondents to the KPMG survey said they believe new and emerging technologies were critical to the success of strategic initiatives planned in the next 18 months. Data and analytics and business process management tools (both 54 percent) scored highest in the survey, while respondents also selected mobile and core system modernization (both 49 percent), digital media (48 percent) and cloud (47 percent) as important to meeting their organizations’ goals.