Dive Brief:

• 80% of respondents were "concerned" about digital disruptions and competition, "especially from new digitally savvy entrants," according to a report released yesterday by Accenture and HfS.
• The report also found that respondents believed 50-90% of their data is "largely unstructured and inaccessible."
• The report said digital disruption, data explosion and customer experience "are the driving forces behind the need for companies to transform how they do business."

Dive Insight:

For some companies, this report may be confirmation of their nightmares: younger, smaller, digitally savvy companies supplanting larger ones and stealing market value with better data processing and cleaning techniques.

The good news is, many bigger, established companies are learning very quickly how to keep up (Hostess Brands, Target and Walmart, for example), so maintaining tight competition with the slimmer, more technically agile companies is definitely possible.

According to Accenture's report, "The research clearly suggests the future belongs to organizations with Intelligent Operations that enable them to have a 360-degree view of their operations, enabling quicker, insight-led decision making."

That's attainable for an established company that's been around for a while, but perhaps easier for a start-up.

The report outlines clear steps for how to become more digitally agile: hire "innovative talent," implement automation, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence to better collect, clean and process data; and engage in "symbiotic relationships" with the competition.

In other words, don't let the start-ups get the best of you by competing in the traditional way. Engage in partnerships and see what you can learn from them, and what they can learn from you.

"Traditional business service providers are increasingly collaborating with enterprises in a true partnership model that maximizes co-innovation," the report said.

Finally, the report recommends using a top-down directive to spur growth within your company, because the success rate of a top-down directive is much higher than directives to cut costs or launch new products.

The clue here is to take a comprehensive approach to preparing a company to compete in the digital age. That requires a top-down, cohesive company vision — if that's in place, any company of any size already has a leg up.