The Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey COVID-19 Recontact Survey, 2020, fielded in May, confirms what we already knew from our clients: COVID-19 has had a significant impact on Asia Pacific firms’ business and technology priorities. This new data also allows us to compare the results of the survey during COVID-19 to those we recorded in January 2020. In our May survey, we recontacted about 10% of the business and tech leaders who participated in the January survey — more than 400 respondents in Asia Pacific — to understand how their business and tech priorities have shifted due to the crisis.

  • While 26% of respondents are at firms in survival mode, 16% are in growth mode. Companies generally find themselves in one of three modes: survival, adaptive, and growth. Once leaders understand their mode, they need to clarify their top-level goals and take specific actions to create the right tech budget both for their current situation and as their business conditions change in the future. Unsurprisingly, May’s data showed that 51% of respondents at firms in Asia Pacific expect their future tech spend to decrease; this is in stark contrast to the 53% that expected to increase it by more than 5% before the crisis.
  • Business agility is a top business priority across modes. Again, unsurprisingly, respondents at companies in survival mode put growing revenues and cutting costs as their top two business priorities for the next 12 months. While those in adaptive mode also see cutting costs as a high priority, respondents at firms in growth mode put improving their ability to innovate and accelerating their shift to digital business in their top five business priorities. Interestingly, accelerating their response to business and market changes is one of the top five priorities regardless of the company’s mode. Today’s highly volatile and uncertain environment makes it clear to business and tech leaders that enterprise adaptiveness is the only sustainable way forward.
  • Large internet-of-things, big data, and martech projects could be delayed or canceled. We know that COVID-19 has had a direct and positive impact on cloud infrastructure and platforms, IT security and risk, and mobility spend. What the May survey also shows is that companies in survival or adaptive mode are likely to cancel or delay some of the tech purchases that they had planned before the crisis. This is particularly true for internet-of-things, big data, business intelligence and analytics, and martech software purchases.
  • Work-from-home is the new normal. Our #PandemicEX survey data had already examined this trend: About half of respondents said they couldn’t wait to get back to work, while 44% said they were afraid to go back. In the Technographics survey, 48% of all respondents in Asia Pacific indicated that their firm would permanently maintain a higher rate of full-time remote employees; this increased to 68% of respondents at companies in growth mode. Business and tech leaders will have to take a step back and design remote work programs that enable their teams to be more resilient going forward.

My colleague Samuel Higgins and I recently presented the results of this survey in a free on-demand webinar. We are also available to walk you through the results in more detail as part of an advisory session. Please get in touch with your account manager or send an email here.