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A new survey from Gartner (News - Alert) reveals that by 2017, 25 percent of businesses will lose their competitive ranking due to digital business incompetence. The company, which surveyed 151 participants that are actively involved in digital business strategy decisions, found that 90 percent of respondents believed that competition for talent would prove detrimental to digital business success.

“The next decade will move beyond the notion of using technology to automate businesses and toward positioning technology as revenue builder, market maker and customer finder,” said Diane Morello, managing vice president at Gartner. “When companies have those targets in mind, digital business becomes real. The impact of digital business will be undeniable: It will introduce new business models, cause industries to be ’digitally remastered’ and change the way that businesses put great minds to work. Few things have jumped into the consciousness of business executives as quickly as digital business. In our recent Talent on the Digital Frontier survey, roughly one in two participants say that their digital business strategy either is their business strategy or is at least an integrated part of that business strategy.”

Morello said a digital business strategy builds value and generates revenue from digital assets and it creates opportunities from relationships between systems, people, places and things.

According to Gartner, if businesses want to kick-start digital business activity, they need to start identifying the important strategy players as well as those with both technology and business acumen within the organization and outside it. These players can be instrumental in building a digital business “community of practice”, which will drive cross-business understanding. CIOs that can manage talent from different employment models and channels will be able to quickly build on their digital expertise.

Digital business can also create a number of opportunities for the use of digital technology within and beyond organizational boundaries; it can help in bringing together a platform of problem-solving experts from across the globe. The race for acquiring digital business expertise offers CIOs and HR personnel a robust opportunity for building a comprehensive alliance for addressing their goals.