This award recognizes the organization that has transformed and digitalized processes to ensure employees (people), things (systems, devices), applications, and processes connect to enable the seamless flow of data and drive business outcomes. This transformation should highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, collaborative work environments, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.

This award recognizes the organization that is able to rethink and effectively transform the way customer-related initiatives are done in the organization (e.g., customer engagement, customer experience, customer service). The Future of Customer Experience (FoCX) is characterized by the changing and shifting nature of the relationship between customers and brands through a lens or prism of technology. IDC has defined the FoCX as an empathetic relationship between customers and brands built on what the customer wants and how they want to be treated through the technology lens of awareness, engaging, learning, and, measuring.

This award recognizes that digital infrastructure provides the platform for agile business using dedicated and public cloud compute, storage, network, edge, management, automation, and lifecycle services to help the business scale, adapt, and compete in a software and data intensive world. This award recognizes the organization that is leading the use of digital infrastructure to transform their business, engage customers and employees, and accelerate business innovation.

This award recognizes the organization that has made impactful positive changes to their enterprise intelligence by innovating around how they synthesize information, how they learn from these insights and share those learnings across the organization, how they deliver insights at scale, and how they develop and promote a data culture.

The future of industry ecosystems is open, dynamic, and shared, evolving like a biological ecosystem that changes in response to pressure, competition, or disruption. Businesses that consider their ecosystem an expansive set of building blocks and are driven by the opportunity to better deliver values, outcomes, and experiences to individuals and industry ecosystem participants will be able to adjust to meet market change or opportunity as required, much in the same way nature finds a way to adapt. For instance, to mitigate market disruptions, Company X starts to rely on its ecosystem players and partners, while leveraging technologies that allow it to understand the horizon and flex its offerings to stay relevant to the changing consumer needs and requirements.

 

This award recognizes the organization’s ability to generate value by its participation in a new digital economy. New business models will emerge, maybe driven by new customer requirements and ways of operating, that will spur the creation of innovative, digital ecosystems that leverage software platforms to deliver scale and speed.

This award recognizes the future enterprise that is able to rethink the way operations is managed. It is a fundamental shift in the operations model to one that fosters data-driven resilient decision making in the context of the enterprise, and supports operational strategies that are designed to support increased operational agility and resilience rather than centrally focused on delivering efficiency above all else. Operational transformation is critical for effectively scaling digital transformation initiatives.

This award recognizes the organization that can maintain the trust amid the evolving needs of its customers. The role of IT in maintaining the trust of customers and other stakeholders in their enterprises has historically centered on preventing cyberattacks and data breaches while helping business leaders achieve regulatory compliance. As the digital transformation age unfolds, however, many are pursuing initiatives focused on customer experiences and empathy at scale, enterprise and ecosystem intelligence, smart and autonomous devices, and other efforts that introduce new trust threats, challenges, and opportunities.

This award recognizes the organization that rethinks the way works get done. The Future of Work is a fundamental shift in the work model to one that fosters human-machine collaboration, enables new skills and worker experiences, and supports a secure location- and device-agnostic virtual workspace and reimagined physical workplace. Work transformation is critical for effectively scaling digital transformation initiatives.

This award recognizes the organization which is working towards becoming a Future Enterprise to lead in the digital-first world. A Future Enterprise is a digitally determined organization where digital is achieved at a scale across its operations; innovating at a pace that is an order of magnitude greater than traditional businesses. It is driven by a customer-centric and empowered workforce that embraces experimentation and risk-taking as it seeks to continuously improve its products, services, and experiences. Technology and data are its lifeblood, fueling more efficient operations, new revenue streams, and heightened customer loyalty. To put simply, the Future Enterprise is the gold standard of how organizations must organize and invest to participate in digital-first markets.

This award recognizes that the modern enterprise must transform itself from a software consumer into a large-scale software innovator. A winning organization shows that a project or initiative can source, augment, develop and/or distribute software IP (intellectual property) that delivers differentiation, disrupts the market through external products or services, or has significant positive impact on internal operations.

This award recognizes Digital Native Business (DNB) organizations – start-ups, scale-ups, and Unicorns – that have made significant breakthroughs in the marketplace, disrupting and transforming markets and industries through the creation of highly innovative and competitive products, services, or business models to compete in the digital-first world. DNBs are characterized by having a digital-first approach and tech-driven operating models. They aggressively leverage new and emerging technologies, platform services, and marketplaces, and adopt an ecosystem-centric approach to drive higher levels of customer experiences (CX) and market differentiation. DNBs grow and scale fast, disrupting industries and creating new markets.

This award recognizes organizations which have demonstrated digital resiliency. IDC has defined Digital Resiliency as the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging its digital capabilities to not only restore business operations, but also capitalize on the changed conditions to ensure future success in the next normal. This definition includes business resiliency but goes much further in its emphasis of the distinctive role of digital technology and also the need to go beyond mere survival and continuation of the status quo. The pandemic revealed that some digitally advanced companies were not only able to continue to operate effectively but were quickly able to pivot their business either to new customer segments, or delivery of new digital services to support growth

This award recognizes the organization that demonstrates the commitment to embed sustainability within the business. This organization aims to address sustainability in a holistic manner, where the goal is for sustainability to become an integral part of the overall business strategy as its underlying foundation. IDC believes that purpose-driven sustainability can deliver long-term impact to any organization and its strategy, operations, employees, customers, and ultimately, bring new innovations into the market it serves

This award recognizes the town/city/county/province/government entity that is able to rethink and effectively transform citizen wellbeing initiatives (e.g., citizen engagement, citizen experience, citizen service). Citizen wellbeing is characterized by the changing and shifting nature of the relationship between citizens and Government organizations through a lens or prism of technology.

Citizen wellbeing refers to enhanced citizen engagement in a smart city environment resulting in increased access to healthcare, availability of a seamless education system, and reduced digital divide enabling increased access to government services to citizens irrespective of their location.

This award recognizes the Government organization that has transformed and digitalized their states/cities/provinces to enhance the lives of citizens, ultimately resulting in progressive societal outcomes. Such smart city transformations highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.

 

Connected cities, as part of the Smart Cities initiative, aim to interconnect various citizen-services aspects, supported with related infrastructure, harnessing the power of technologies, to result in citizen experience enhancement.

This award recognizes the Government organization that has transformed and digitalized their states/cities/provinces to enhance the lives of citizens, ultimately resulting in societal outcomes. Such smart city transformations highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.

Digital policies in a smart city environment refer to the regulatory aspects that shape and control the administrative functions enabling the deployment of various services, through digital platforms. Such system of approach, with strict adherence to compliance, brings better administrative control for efficient civic engagements that in turn lead to more inclusive societal and economic development.

This award recognizes the CEO who has developed a strategy to create a future enterprise. This CEO’s vision follows an agenda for the digital-first world, responding to new customer requirements, capabilities, critical infrastructure, and industry ecosystems. This CEO is an excellent storyteller and is successful in delivering this message to the rest of the organization. They continuously stress the need for a digital enterprise as part of overall brand and strategy in response to the needs of a digital-first world. Their vision includes working with partners within the ecosystem to develop new products, services, and experiences, built by a digitally capable and empowered workforce in a data-driven organization. The CEO also ensures that organization is equipped to take on the challenges of the digital-first world: striking a balance between business agility and innovation, managing risk and security, and cultivating sustainability within the business.

The winner of this category must be the CEO of the entire business/group, and not just a division or department. They may also hold a Managing Director position for the region.

This award recognizes the CIO/CDO who has played a determining role in setting the vision and responsible for the execution of digital transformation (DX) within an organization. Traditionally, the CIO/CDO would have the authority in making key decisions such as project focus, vendor selection, budget approvals, the KPIs at which the project is measured against, etc. The CIO/CDO of the Year would be the role model within their organization on how they manage the continuous transition from old to new tech and experimental to operational in the context of DX, empower their employees, and enable and integrate innovations.

In the digital-first world, many applications of technology will not go back to the way they were. In addition to growing attention on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues, aspects of digital risk and impact on competitive differentiators are growing conversations in nearly every boardroom. As a result, these leaders are in the unique position to influence the business direction of their enterprise. In this regard, IDC is recognizing today’s fast-tracked CIOs/CDOs who are boldly leading their organization’s DX by responding to the needs of a digital-first world.