Dive Brief:

• Design thinking, open thinking and platform thinking are three levers business and IT leaders are using for successful digital transformation, according to a new report by Alfresco Software and Forbes Insights.

• The report found 64% of "best-in-class" firms that have mastered all three levers reported "significant" annual growth versus 43% of those that have only mastered two of the three areas, the report found. The report was based on a survey of 328 senior-level IT executives.

• The study also found that a focus on user experience is changing the types of staff companies hire and how they deploy resources. About 85% of respondents indicated they now have dedicated user experience teams, and 60% plan to increase resources in customer experience over the next three years.

Dive Insight:

Design thinking involves optimizing user and customer experience to guide all business technology decisions; open thinking focuses on gaining innovation from both inside and outside the organization; and platform thinking involves building an ecosystem of partners and customers that exchange capabilities and data, according to Alfresco.

The primary attribute that distinguishes those that outpace their competitors and those that don’t? A strategy of customer- and user-first thinking. As companies look to modernize technology and business processes, there is a focus placed on designing how people interact with technology. 

For IT leaders, it’s all about evolving their thinking. Digital transformation is here to stay, and it requires new ways of looking at things. Digital transformation is now a priority for an overwhelming 97% of the C-level respondents, according to a recent survey from Quickbase.