Planning and preparing for the future is a vital prospect of any business’s success. Criticaleye partner, Cognizant, commissioned Economist Impact to examine the state of businesses today, considering present needs through the Future-Ready Business Benchmark research program.

Key takeaways include: 

• How the size of a firm doesn’t have as big a difference as it did because of rapid digitalisation. 

• Current levels of performance cannot be sustained without greater investment in preparedness. Countries and industries on average are scoring 60 out of 100 for future-readiness and the top 20% firm-level performers score 74 out of 100. 

• Nine in ten executives say they’re willing to sacrifice short-term gain for long-term advantage, but results have indicated this doesn’t happen in practice. 

• Better use of data will require organisation-wide change. The report estimates a 3-7% increase in firm productivity as a result of big data analytics capabilities. However, many firms aren’t even meeting a basic “small data” threshold.