Attainable Goal

There are stages that we go through as we focus on a digital business economy and not “the technology”.

We can’t do everything all at once. They are some natural stages to go through. There are some variations on these but these are fairly normal.

What are some of those stages?

• Adopting a digital technology platform — There are some key components that should be enabled and adopted. Consumers and employees are all over and have been for years. Assessing where you are on the journey with a plan to catch up is essential. They must become a digital business reality.
  • Cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service)
  • Big data and analytics
  • Social business
  • Mobility
• Leveraging innovative accelerators of the digital technology platform — Movement from the mainframe and client/server computing toward innovative accelerators is huge. We are still on a predominantly technological level here but with a clearer focus on business and customer innovation (on top of the traditional goals of optimization and so forth). Consider:
  • Robotics,
  • Natural interfaces
  • 3D Printing
  • Internet of Things
  • Cognitive systems
  • Next generation security
• Moving from focus on change (or transformation) to focus on innovation — Here we are looking at new business models, ways of engaging customers, building ecosystems of new revenue etc. This becomes key as the foundations, goals, strategy, culture and vision to do so are in place. What will this accomplish?
  • Digital customer experience
  • Innovation
  • Competition
  • Differentiation
  • Automation
  • Cost reduction
  • Optimization
  • Speed and experiences of stakeholders as business drivers
• Acceleration of innovation and change — This results in a stage whereby the disruptive impact of digital change is about to be felt in every industry as enterprises flip the switch and massively scale up their digital transformation initiatives to secure a leadership role in the ‘digital industrial revolution’.
• Digital change is at the core of your new digital business economy — They will rapidly impact all business sectors even more and faster than we’ve seen before. And the innovation accelerators such as the Internet of Things, cognitive (artificial intelligence) and the likes will be key in this evolution, as are the ‘traditional’ backbones of the digital Platform (cloud, big data/analytics, mobile etc.)