Digital innovation is dominating the agenda of technology leaders, but many companies are struggling to manage it, according to the Harvey Nash 2015 CIO Survey in association with KPMG. The pace of digital and the race to innovate has left many organisations lacking an enterprise-wide digital strategy and desperately seeking to acquire the right skills. Despite efforts to close the skills gap, this year skills concerns are running one third higher than in 2013. The demand for big data analytic skills has leapt to the number one most-needed skill, skyrocketing to almost six times higher than the next-most-scarce skill, change management.

Two thirds (66 percent) of CIOs report digital disruption [change resulting from digital technologies that disrupt established business models] as a very significant change to their business, driving them to create new business models and bring new products and services to market faster than before.

Globally, large companies report being at a disadvantage when it comes to digital, with only 17 percent of them saying they believe they’ll do ‘much better’ than competitors in managing digital disruption, compared to 35 percent of small organisations. Only one in ten CIOs believe their organisation will be unaffected by digital disruption in the coming years.

After receiving a record number of responses from nearly 4,000 IT leaders from more than 50 countries and capturing more than a quarter million data points, it is believed this is now the largest survey of IT leadership in the world.