{"id":1977,"date":"2022-04-01T16:04:52","date_gmt":"2022-04-01T07:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovative-solutions.co.jp\/eng\/?p=1977"},"modified":"2024-10-16T13:09:12","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T04:09:12","slug":"digital-maturity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovative-solutions.co.jp\/eng\/digital-maturity\/","title":{"rendered":"Insight on Malaysia\u2019s Digital Maturity"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Insight on Malaysia\u2019s Digital Maturity<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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2022\/4\/1<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Author: Aqmar Zakaria<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Introduction<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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According to a report published in tandem by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company, Asia is home to 4.2 billion people and the fastest-growing digital economy that is expected to grow by 200% in the next four years [1]. Two of the world\u2019s fastest digitising countries in the world are India and Indonesia, which belong to the APAC region, and half of the amount of internet consumption in the next ten years is going to happen in Asia. Asia holds growth potential and there is already momentum to rise higher at least in the next five or ten years. Furthermore, Asia has gone through technology transformation before the COVID-19 pandemic, which helps the economy endure the crisis quite well. Therefore, in this article, I will enlighten the readers on digital maturity in Asia, particularly Malaysia.<\/p>

Just to share a brief of my journey and how I ended up currently working in Japan. Malaysia is my home country but I have been spending my adult life abroad since I was 20 years old where I lived for 3 years in France for my bachelor\u2019s degree study. After finishing my study in France, I moved back to Malaysia for my Master\u2019s study then I came to Japan for my Ph.D. study and now it has been my fourth year in Japan. Since I am originally from Malaysia, I am happy to write about Malaysia’s digital maturity. Another reason for writing this article is that three months ago, I had an opportunity to have a meeting with an executive of a leading BPM vendor whose responsibility includes the APAC region. My team presented on APAC\u2019s digital maturity since both companies have a mutual goal to expand their business into APAC. It took us around a month to do research on digital maturity across APAC and we did a comparison between three countries, Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan \u2013 representing three members who came from these three countries.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Shifting investment priorities<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations across the globe have adopted and leveraged digital technology to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on businesses. Employees have been engaging in remote work during the pandemic which demands employers to leverage digital technology in their business operations. Remote work trend will stay not only due to omicron infection surge across the globe but businesses found that the productivity is better when their employees engage in remote working [2]. Therefore, going digital is no longer optional but becomes a must for businesses to stay competitive and resilient. Due to these reasons, businesses around APAC have been shifting their investment priorities into digital adoption efforts to optimise business processes and sustain the growth during the pandemic and post-pandemic, realising the digital era is not in the future but it is happening [3].<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Digital Evolution Scorecard<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWhen I was figuring out a proper framework to start searching for information on digital maturity for Malaysia, I encountered an article written by Bhaskar Chakravorti et al. [4]. Digital Evolution Scorecard 2020 edition was developed by Tufts University\u2019s Fletcher School and Mastercard to provide an overview on the current state of digital development, digital momentum, and the impact of digital evolution on how countries respond to the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe. Their Digital Evolution Scorecard gave me an idea of the main indicators of a country\u2019s digital maturity to be searched on. The scorecard covers 4 key drivers as defined in Exhibit 1 based on 160 indicators for 90 countries across the globe. To better understand the indicators used in the scorecard, I emailed the authors to get clarification, and the co-investigator, Ravi Shankar kindly responded to my email. He shared the link [5] of their interactive digital intelligence index site to answer my question and the data did give me a better understanding of each indicator. It was impressive looking at their open data initiative which I think is a good research practice, therefore it is freely available to everyone and people directly can benefit from the research.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Exhibit 1: Digital Evolution Scorecard and 4 key drivers scope justifications.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Digital Maturity<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Generally, digital maturity is a measure to indicate the digital technology adoption effort and its state. These include the infrastructure setup, key investments to support the infrastructure setup, institutional environment, and availability of digital or IR4.0 technology. In this article context, a country with a high level of digital maturity has an advanced internet infrastructure, supportive government policies to establish a digital ecosystem in the country, and a high number of innovations in the country. On the contrary, countries with low levels of digital maturity struggle to embrace recent digital technologies.<\/p>

As I mentioned in the introduction part, this digital maturity information is part of our presentation during the meeting with the leading BPM vendor. I learned during the meeting how advanced it is in business in the Western part particularly the United States in deploying digital technologies. Meanwhile, Asian countries are still struggling with digital transformation. Businesses in Western counterparts already embarked on hyper-automation or intelligent process automation\u2013 a new term that I only knew after the meeting. According to Gartner, hyper-automation is one of the top technology trends for 2022 [6].<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Digital maturity \u2013 Malaysia<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The information was arranged based on 4 key drivers in the abovementioned scorecard. The definition and scope of each key driver are shown in Exhibit 1.<\/p>