New Research Reveals Businesses Overestimate Their Digital AgilityThe “Oracle Cloud Agility” study was just released and here’s one of its main findings: businesses worldwide overestimate their agility.

“While a majority of businesses believe they are agile, Oracle’s research highlights that many organizations cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test, and launch new applications, leaving them poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats,” says Oracle.

The research also uncovered a lack of awareness among businesses around how technology — for instance, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) — can be used to help address the challenges.

The Oracle Cloud Agility study is based on a survey of 2,263 employees working for large global enterprises.

“The results show that 64 percent consider their organization to be agile (i.e., able to adjust quickly to new business opportunities or to iterate new products and services quickly),” reported Oracle. “When looking at the United States, businesses are even more positive, with 66 percent believing their business to be agile.”

Notably, 52 percent of global respondents indicated that their business does not have an IT infrastructure capable of meeting competitive threats.

“Businesses clearly know agility holds the key to their success, but there is an awareness gap around exactly how this agility can be realized through the right technology investments,” said Robert Shimp, group vice president, Oracle. “Today, PaaS can enable businesses to build new applications quickly – in as little as two weeks – allowing them to launch new internal and customer-facing applications rapidly. This capability allows organizations to respond almost immediately to market conditions and get their products and services to customers ahead of the competition.”