If an organization wants to stay alive in today’s business environment, it must go digital. It’s not true for all businesses, but the vast majority will have to have a strong digital presence to move forward.

Companies that can use the different digital solutions to interact with their customers, partners and vendors have more opportunities to create better products and improve business operations.

The Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report highlights how companies that “go digital” will have a clear advantage over those that do not.

According to the report, technology has become such an integral part of business operations, everyone in a decision-making position must understand its value to the organization as a whole.

The report makes recommendations on how organizations can use technology and take advantage of what it offers to improve their positions against the competition. They include:

• Leveraging technology to create digital relationships at scale – Understanding customers yields better customer loyalty, which invariably leads to longer customer retention. Although there are many tools to engage the customer with technology, they’re used as just another tool for talking and selling channels, instead of improving relationships with the customer.
• Design for analytics to get the “right” data – If the right questions are not asked, an analysis performed based on the wrong questions will result in the wrong solution for the business. While this may seem obvious, many businesses don’t formulate the right questions when applications are being designed. Companies that understand this will get the right analysis and achieve better results.
• Data velocity – while the speed at which a business gathers data is very important in today’s environment, it is more important to accurately turn the data into actionable insight before the data loses its value.
• Be active, not just defensive, with security – Though better security solutions are available in the market, there are more threats for businesses of all sizes. Understanding security is an ongoing offensive operation, and not just a defensive one will keep attacks to a minimum and increase response time if a system is breached.

Other recommendations include make work and processes more social, bridge the last mile of virtualization with software-defined network, and the importance of being in the cloud.

“Organizations and their leaders need to hit the reset button on how they use technology to drive market differentiation, deepen customer relationships, and deliver growth and profitability. Our latest Technology Vision report finds that the technology for accomplishing these business goals is available today, but that adopting a new digital mindset is required to harness the potential. The power and reach of converging IT trends such as mobility and cloud means that business leaders need to understand the implications of a software-driven, ‘connected everything’ world,” said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology officer.