German industry has done its homework

For employees in companies, digital transformation is already a lived reality today. The associated organizational changes are being felt by managers in sales and marketing just as much as by their colleagues in human resources.

In addition, almost 70 percent of those responsible expect further changes in their own organization over the next two years. These and other results are provided by the recently presented study "Digital Transformation - Challenges and Opportunities for Sales, Marketing and Human Resources" by Materna and the market research and consulting company PAC.

For the survey, PAC interviewed heads of HR, sales and marketing from 100 companies in Germany with at least 500 employees in July 2015.

Almost 60 percent of executives believe that the innovation potential of digital transformation within their own organization has not yet been fully exploited.

Among the planned digitization initiatives of HR managers are the identification and promotion of specialists and managers as well as employee branding.

But managers are also pursuing topics such as the digitization of HR paper files, including intelligent search, and cost reduction in HR processes with their projects.

On the digital agenda of sales and marketing managers are personalized campaigns and a consistent user experience across all channels. But executives also see a need for improved IT-supported collaboration between sales and marketing.

However, companies are also aware of the challenges they face. These include data security and data protection as well as precise knowledge of digital projects at the competition and improved collaboration between different parts of the company.

And, of course, there must also be sufficient human resources to put the plans into practice.

"Overall, the survey results suggest that there is a real sense of optimism in Germany when it comes to digital transformation.

Therefore, we expect more and more companies to launch concrete digitization projects for the functional areas of sales, marketing and human resources"

explains Frank Niemann, Vice President Software & SaaS Markets at PAC.

External consultants are in demand

To implement the digital transformation, companies are already using external service providers and will continue to do so in the future. Digitalization is prompting companies to invest in both software products and IT services such as design, implementation, strategy and process consulting, and cloud services.

Important features of these external offerings are quickly realizable, ready-made solutions for specific tasks, a service offering that is as comprehensive as possible, and the ability to also take over operation of the IT systems.