The main objective of Latin American companies is to accelerate their digitization to boost their economic recovery and business speed, according to Ricardo Villate, Group Vice President for Latin America of the firm of information technology market analysts, IDC.
In the IDC Tech CMO Forum 2020, Villate highlighted that, among the main changes generated by the pandemic, is the “Digital First”, to give priority to digital marketing and sales in organizations in response to changing habits of technology buyers in the new normal.
Businesses, he complimented, have chosen to accelerate their digitization for their economic recovery, as something imperative to accelerate the speed of business and therefore, the CIO’s agenda is focused on the future of the company. Focusing on:
- Know the customer better and anticipate their demands. One out of every two companies in the region is changing the way they interact with their customers, expanding their online services, through areas such as intelligence and analytics.
- Accelerate innovation to generate value in the digital economy and grow its ecosystems. Just over 60% of those interviewed by IDC indicated that it is expanding its supply chain with new partners.
- Be more resilient. Three out of five companies are digitally enabling their operations, increasing automation and traceability to enable self-service, and reducing contact between people.
Each LatAm country work with his strengths
In the case of the Mexican manufacturing industry -the largest in the region-, Edgar Fierro, VP & General Director for IDC Mexico, mentioned that organizations seek greater integration throughout the value chain in the cloud to work on open platforms and reduce errors, as well as greater automation of its processes, to respond to the demands of the new free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, which is expected to generate a rapid recovery in companies.
Brazil’s financial sector – the largest in Latin America and one of the nation’s leading IT investors – has focused on being more resilient and accelerating its digital transformation to compete and collaborate with Fintech companies, described Denis Arcieri, Director General for IDC Brazil.
For the Chilean mining sector – which concentrates 27% of copper production, 38% of lithium metal production and more than 60% metal iodine in the world – technology has been key to its development and will continue to be so. When we look at your investments for replacement projects, expansion, and new projects; technology is part of these investments, playing a fundamental role in creating agile mining operations. Doing this consistently and reliably means that the exploration, extraction, processing, and transportation of mineral products takes place in an interconnected environment and that they can respond dynamically to changing external factors, in a particular price, and that it can allow control and visibility across the ecosystem from one end to the other, said Natalia Vega, General Director for IDC Chile and Peru.
While Colombia – which has the third-largest BPO workforce in the region, with 131%, after Brazil (32.6%) and Mexico (14.2%) – promotes greater technological efficiency and availability, such as teleworking, to maintain growth in this sector and generate more than 15 thousand new jobs, with the support of the national government, explained Juan Carlos Villate, Consultant Partner for IDC in the country.
Food and wood producers in Argentina, which generate up to 21% of GDP and traditionally invest little in IT, have been accelerating the integration of vertical solutions of IoT, intelligence, robotics, and cloud to improve relevant aspects in the new normal such as traceability from animals and food to their marketing chain, and improve production efficiency by automating the intelligence of the climate sensor network, said Diego Anesini, Research Director for IDC Latin America and head of IDC’s subsidiary in Argentina.