Corporates urged to embrace digital wave

The average business is lower than 40 per cent digitised, and this is putting its future growth prospects at risk by not tapping and implementing its digital transformation in a speedier fashion.

That is the message from tech giant, Microsoft which believes Kenyan companies and industries are slower in embracing digitization and is now urging such firms to tap into such opportunities if they are to remain relevant in this fast-paced statistical era.

“The role of today’s CFOs and finance executives must take into consideration a much broader scope – requiring a heightened technological sophistication. The emergence of the digital age is fundamentally changing the priorities and roles of today’s finance executives, and security forms an integral part of this,” commented Geoffrey Mathare, Finance Lead for Enterprise Business for Microsoft North, West, East & Southern Africa, Levant & Pakistan countries.

To remain competitive and foster an environment that is agile to the change brought about by digital transformation, Microsoft urged finance executives to lead their companies to reach goals concerning growth, profitability and productivity while tapping into technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud.

He made those remarks Tuesday during a roundtable engagement between Microsoft and Harvard Business Review with Chief Financial Officers (CFO) and Chief Operations Officers (COO) working within various organizations with the aim of educating and highlighting how advanced technologies have presented unprecedented changes – whose insights is keen to look into how the role of these functions continues to evolve and how they are tasked driving corporate performance through the use of technology and setting the organizations strategic technology roadmap powered by data.