Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future: cloud

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How Digital Leaders are Different

We asked 50 futurists, professionals employed to review trends and develop strategy, to identify and rank the top five ways they believe digital transformation will drive value generation between now and 2020. Here are their top five answers:

Accelerates speed to market
Strengthens competitive positioning
Boosts revenue growth
Raises employee productivity
Expands ability to acquire, engage and retain customers

These top five value generators offer significant business advantages; but if your organization can achieve them faster than your competitors, there is a bonus advantage. We call it the Ax2 phenomenon (advantages have advantages). Not only do digital leaders realize competitive advantages before others, but they also have the advantage of insights from new data, which leads to new actions and new insights not yet understood or possible for laggards.

Research In Motion (RIM), the progenitor of the Blackberry, responded slowly to Apple’s launch of the iPhone. Years passed before RIM responded with its first smartphone. During this time, Apple worked at “digital speed” to improve its iPhones and the iOS operating system, and hundreds of thousands of software applications were developed for it. Each of these versions provided additional insights into consumers and their behaviors. The Ax2 phenomenon enabled Apple to rapidly widen the gap between leader and laggard, a competitive advantage that proved impossible for RIM to overcome.

Executives must closely watch the innovation efforts of competitors, and recognize that it is not only the new products and services that are being introduced that can be differentiating but also the data they glean from new innovations that can spawn additional advantages.

Information dominance is the strategic imperative of the 21st century. The good news for executives is that investing in digital technologies to gain information dominance makes sense as the return on investment for digital technologies averages nearly 50% among survey participants, but jumps to an astounding 230% for the top 25%.

Achieving information dominance involves understanding the data required to achieve competitive advantage, and then collecting and analyzing it to glean business meaning faster than the competition. Information dominance, however, is meaningless unless it results in actionable insights, which lead to appropriate actions, at the right time and place. It’s not the ability to collect and analyze data faster; it is the ability to understand and act on it faster. Businesses that can “understand and act with speed” will dominate those that are slower.

In today’s age of hyper-digital transformation, enterprises must digitally transform and implement OILS (optimized information logistics systems) that can respond and change with self-sustaining business agility. These abilities take more than digital technologies; they require a new way of thinking, which is revealed in our data on digital leaders:

Digital leaders recognize and respond to underlying market forces, and are budgeting and planning to implement specific business strategies and digital technologies in specific sequences to maximize ROI and competitive advantage.
Digital leaders recognize the impact of digital technologies on the expectations of consumers and markets. These expectations are speeding the tempo of operations beyond human time to digital time. The demands for digital time require humans to upgrade IT environments and augment their capabilities with AI and robotic process automation (bots) to enable mass volumes of transactions to be processed in milliseconds in order to support real-time and mobile environments.
Digital leaders develop a digital doctrine and strategy to unify and guide all business and technology strategies, tactics and investments and provide a shared frame of reference across their organization.
Digital leaders are exploiting the Ax2 phenomenon. The Ax2 phenomenon enables enterprises to gain new and unique business insights earlier than their competitors, leading to competitive advantages that result from the collection and analysis of data not yet available to digital laggards.
Digital leaders identify the digital technologies they expect to have a significant impact on their businesses across the three digital transformation ages spanning 2016 to 2025. These technologies are not all created equal in their business impact, and some are still not ready for prime time, but are maturing fast. As a result, it is critical to carefully time the adoption and implementation of digital technologies in accordance with the age in which they will deliver maximum ROI and competitive advantage.

First and foremost, digital leaders understand the reality and degree of impact that digital technologies are having on their customers, and their ability to compete. They recognize the pace of change and are aligning their strategies and budgets in ways that will provide them with competitive advantage now and in the future.

Watch my latest video on digital technology trends:

Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The 3 Tsunamis of Digital Transformation - Be Prepared

Change is hard, and many of us procrastinate, make excuses or lag behind. Today, we simply can’t. Digital technologies are no longer “nice-to-have” tools of the business – today they are the business. Digital laggards are already finding their markets disrupted and their abilities to compete overturned. As they desperately try to outrun the Darwinian effect of their slow responses, they are faced with not one but three periods – or ages – of digital transformation to navigate – disruptive transformation, hyper-digital transformation and ubiquitous transformation. Understanding these three ages, and when they will emerge, is critical for business success.

Some may argue digital transformation started 70 years ago with ENIAC, the first commercially available computer, while others argue it started with the Internet. Whenever the starting point actually was, we can all agree that the proliferation of digital over the last five years has brought unprecedented personal and business disruption.

The age of disruptive transformation introduced eight specific technologies that disrupted traditional business operations and IT infrastructures, and are having a “large to very large” business impact on at least one-quarter of the digital leaders in our survey:

Cybersecurity (59%) 
Big data/business analytics (54%)
Mobile technologies (40%) 
Cloud computing (32%)
Social media (31%)
Collaboration technologies (26%)
IoT/sensors (26%)
Biotechnology (25%)

These eight technologies are data-centric – they are all about producing, managing, analyzing, securing and storing data in new and innovative ways, and then acting on it. With the exception of biotechnology, these digital technologies are critical components of OILS, and profoundly impact business strategies, business processes and human interactions.

These digital technologies – which should already be implemented and scaling to have an impact on your organization – now serve as the foundation for the next two periods of digital transformation. If these top eight digital technologies are not already in place within your IT infrastructure, the current age of hyper-digital transformation will threaten your company’s very existence.

During the second period of digital-related change – the age of hyper-digital transformation – the pace of change and the business impact of digital technologies greatly accelerate. The eight top technologies from the previous era will rapidly increase their business impact by an average of 74% among digital leaders by 2020. This increase is a sign of the enormity of the forces at work, the size of investments needed, and the cadence at which organizations need to adapt to stay relevant and competitive.

In the age of hyper-digital transformation, nine additional, incremental digital technologies join the eight from the previous age. These nine start with a relatively low level of importance today but increase by an average of 145% among digital leaders by the year 2020. These nine additional digital technologies reach the threshold of having an “important to very important” business impact among at least one-fourth of digital leaders:

Telepresence (Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.) (49%)
Digital currency (49%)
Artificial intelligence (46%)
Robotic process automation (software) (41%)
Sharing economy platforms like Uber (39%)
Nanotechnologies (35%)
Robots (hardware) (33%)
Telematics (29%)
Wearables (28%)

When combined, these seventeen digital technologies increase their business impact among digital leaders by an average of 112% between 2016 and 2020. The predicted business impact of these digital technologies mean that the business and IT organizations you operate today will need to look very different by 2020 in order to keep up and compete successfully.

Retail is considered a canary in the coalmine for many other industries. As such, when retail giants begin to fail, it is important to pay attention and heed the warning signs. Retail giant Sports Authority led for bankruptcy in March 2016, and according to many analysts, this was due in large part to the company’s slow response to online and mobile competition. In May 2016, Aeropostale led for bankruptcy, and according to analysts, it couldn’t keep up with fast-changing consumer behaviors and the speed of emerging fashion trends at the same rate as their online competitors. Also in May2016, the UK-based BHS entered administration (i.e., led for bankruptcy), and according to reports, the company had fallen far behind its digital competitors and fast-changing consumer trends.

The consensus among retail analysts is these companies failed to digitally transform quickly enough, which resulted in lost ground to more tech-savvy competitors.

In the final period of the digital transformation trilogy – the age of ubiquitous transformation in the year 2025 – our research finds the business impact of the previous age slowing as companies work to digest the incredible change of the two previous ages. However, even in this more pedestrian age, respondents expect an impressive 35% increase in the business impact of digital technologies.

In this era, six new technologies mature and join the previous seventeen, all of which are now having a “large to very large” business impact on the organizations at the forefront of digital change:

Blockchain (43%)
Geospatial information systems (41%)
3-D printing (40%)
Virtual reality (39%)
Autonomous self-driving cars (34%)
Drones (33%).

Among digital leaders, these six digital technologies are expected to increase their business impact an average of 96% between 2020 and 2025.

These six additional data-driven technologies are at once foundational and revolutionary. They highlight dramatic changes to come in industries such as transportation, banking, finance and commerce and manufacturing, all made possible by the digital transformations that preceded them.

Timing is everything, and the correct sequencing of technology implementation and budgeting, from proof of concept through implementation of production-ready systems, is critical. Our list of 23 digital technologies, their maturity timeframes and projected business impact (posited by our respondents) are powerful tools to plan your organization’s digital transformation strategy.

Watch the 3-minute video:

Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Robots, AI and the Next 40 Months

In a world that operates on billions of digits every day, humans are too slow and inattentive. To adapt, we must automate the processing of millions of complex transactions on a daily basis, at speeds fast enough to satisfy impatient digital users. This adaptation requires a massive level of digital transformation that can support operations, business processes and decision-making speeds faster than is humanly possible.

Historically, digital technologies get faster, cheaper, more powerful and smaller every couple of years. We humans, however, don’t. We operate in human time, a biological cadence influenced by the physical environment, our well-documented physical, mental and emotional limitations, and the universe that we live in. As digital interactions proliferate, so also does the volume of real-time data and required analysis. Most people are already at their limit of coping with the deluge of data, so we must now digitally augment our capabilities to handle the massive increases in the volume, speed and the complexity of it. These augmentations will involve OILS (optimized information logistics systems), supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and software for process automation.

Software robots (or “bots”) can be developed to analyze vast quantities of data without getting bored, make decisions based on codified decision trees that humans design, and then act in milliseconds. In our research, 18% of digital leaders report intelligent process automation via bots is already having a large to very large impact on their businesses, however, it jumps to 41% by 2020. This represents a dramatic increase of 128% in just 40 months.

We – humans – already at our limit, must find a way to digitally augment our capabilities to handle the massive increases in the volume, speed and the complexity of data with bots.

Slow service annoys us. We are immediately frustrated with people and brands incapable of supporting our digital habits and expectations. To achieve a real-time operational tempo, companies must evolve from "human time" to "digital time." When enterprises can support digital time, they can close process loops faster, harness immediate feedback on what’s happening within the process itself, and act on those insights nearly instantaneously. The result: smarter decisions that enable businesses to operate like never before.

One of the biggest challenges enterprises face today in designing, developing and deploying OILS is upgrading core IT systems that frequently comprise of legacy systems incapable of supporting digital time. Though this is hard work, it is the key to winning.

Our research clearly shows widespread consensus that AI is one of the most important emerging technologies that will help overcome many of these technology and human limitations. Our survey respondents predict AI will be the top digital technology, with the largest impact on their work, by 2020. Currently, only 15% of the respondents think AI is having a large impact on their business. In the next 40 months, however, 46% believe AI will be critical – that’s a 207% increase in pro-AI sentiment.

Digital interactions are often supported by AI systems dependent on real-time analytics to provide contextually relevant and personalized experiences. In addition, as the number of mobile and connected devices with billions of connected sensors increases, so also does the associated data in the ether that needs to be analyzed and turned into actionable intelligence that can be used by AI systems to deliver real-time business value. No wonder, then, that executives in our research forecast big data/business analytics will have the biggest impact of all technologies between the years 2020-2025.

Download the full report for free here.

Watch the report video here.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Wake Up! Your Business Has Changed!

We have all been there. Sitting in a stuffy conference room white-boarding and sharing innovative ideas only to be shut-down by the words, "Our IT environment won't support that." I remember during my time as an IT manager hearing those words over and over. We were encouraged to be innovative and to beat our competition by being faster, quicker, cheaper, but every idea met with an insurmountable IT obstacle. It was, at least, insurmountable from our perspective and pay grade.

I see the following weekly:

Outdated technology stalls company's growth
Outdated technology kills future potential
Outdated technology limits and prevents adjustments to business models
Past IT investments never achieved predicted ROIs so future investments denied

How does the CEO make the case for a do-over with his/her IT environment to prevent an extinction event? It's a hard case to make, but a necessary one. I believe that is the appeal of cloud services and companies like Salesforce.com. You can use their services, and remain flexible to change if the market demands it. You are not locked into massive upfront financial commitments and decades worth of business models and processes cemented by outdated ERPs.

Today more than ever a company's ability to compete and be successful is dependent on technology. Technology evolves so rapidly every company should have a dedicated team studying emerging technologies and their potential impact on their industry, market and company. IDC and Cognizant are now identifying a third platform of computing emerging. It follows the platforms of mainframes and client/servers.

The third platform of computing is made up of four evolving technologies that have combined:

Social
Mobile
Cloud
Big data

This third platform is transforming IT much faster than previous platforms ever did. This has tremendous implications for the IT industry's budgets and priorities.

CIO magazine's managing editor Kim S. Nash writes in the March 28, 2014 edition, "Some of the most effective competitive moves happening today in social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies weren't on anyone's threat horizon until recently." Nash is emphasizing the incredible speed in which these changes are happening and impacting the IT environment. And as we know whatever impacts the market impacts the IT environment and the business.

In my last meeting with Forrester VP John McCarthy in London he stated, "Enterprise Mobility will be as transformative as the introduction of ERPs." That is a bold prediction and one that many CEOs/CIOs are not yet tuned into.

I work with strategy groups in large enterprises around the world, and I must say most do not realize the speed at which digital transformations are happening around them. They feel they can delay budgeting significant IT transformation projects another few years. They think they can maintain a slow iterative pace. My response, "If a company does not keep up with technology at the same pace at which their customers are adopting the technology, they are losing the race and opening up opportunities for competitors."

Salesforce.com's President Keith Block predicted this week that they will be bigger than SAP. He might be right. The market is evolving and adopting cloud services that fast.

Download Cognizant's free Code Halo app for iPads here - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/code-halos/id752380930?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 and learn how Code Halo strategies are changing the rules of business.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Mobile Expert Interviews: Vaidy Iyer on Cloud Mobility and PaaS

I had the privilege of interviewing mobility expert Vaidy Iyer today. He is the founder and CEO of AppsFreedom a company focused on providing enterprise mobility solutions in the form of Multi-Channel, Multi-Device Platform as a Service solutions to the SAP community. I asked if they could compete with SAP's mobile solutions - you should hear his answer! Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vj35zoQ7bE&feature=share

The True Cost of Mobility - Companies are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy mobile apps for their business systems, yet the traditional approach to mobile app development typically costs $250K+ and takes 6+ months for a single app. Today IT professionals are exploring platforms that radically reduce costs and time-to-market for their mobile initiatives, especially around complex applications such as SAP, Oracle, or custom applications.

Download the whitepaper - https://www.capriza.com/resources/whitepapers/?resource=true-cost-of-enterprise-mobility&adgroup=MES
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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Digitizing Beds - Is Your Enterprise in Jeopardy of Digital Transformations?

Coin operated vibrating beds!!!!

In a recent report I read titled Q3 2013 iPass Mobile Workforce Report, mobile workers (1,375 of them) reported hotel WiFi was as important as a comfortable bed. Seventy-four percent say a bad WiFi experience in a hotel would prevent a return visit. BAM!

Competition among hotels over who has the most comfortable beds just got digitized! In a flash, the competitive arena changed from beds to WiFi and beds. It is happening all around us today. The problem is many three-year strategic plans don't anticipate this rate and pace of change and digital transformation.

I see digital transformations in retail banks today. Banks have been investing in interior designers, foot-traffic experts, retail and customer service gurus and neighborhood banks blessed with good feng shui (a Chinese philosophical system of harmonizing the human existence with the surrounding environment), but no one is going to banks any more. The competitive arena moved to the mobile retail banking apps and mobile banking services. BAM!

How would you like to be in the paper map making business, or even a dedicated GPS device company like Garmin or TomTom? BAM! The maps are digitized and the GPS is in your smartphone.

The insurance industry is also experiencing major digital transformations globally. Traditional brokers and agents, and even claims adjusters, are being displaced by mobile apps, call centers and websites. BAM! Insurance companies are hesitant to embrace the digital transformation for fear of alienating their traditional sales channels, but the digital and mobile public are migrating there rapidly.

The retail industry is struggling to understand the best strategy for responding to shoppers who use their smartphones in stores to comparison shop. How do you prevent people from taking a picture of a book and then ordering it from Amazon? If I see a good book on the shelf, I want to know if it comes recommended, if it is available in paperback and are there good used copies to be found for less? I can't get that today by looking at the shelf. BAM!

Last week I was in Copenhagen, Denmark with a hankering for Indian food. I used my iPhone to search for Indian food and found a number of restaurants listed. As I was walking to a location listed on the map I passed several Indian restaurants. These restaurants were in digital blind spots. They did not appear on Google's search engine, and they lost my business. BAM!

I just recently discovered my DirecTV is available on my iPad. Who knew? I can watch my recorded shows from anywhere in the house on my iPad while pretending to watch re-runs of West Wing or Pitch Perfect for the 18th time with my family. BAM! My big screen TV just got less cool since it is fixed to my wall and must be shared with others.

I can image a scenario where restaurants must change the way they operate because of digital transformation. Perhaps you are in a food court environment and you can pull up the individual menus of all restaurants in the building and aggregate them automatically into one giant menu. You can now pick a hamburger from one place, fries from another and a Milkshake from still another. You purchase through your mobile app, and the food is delivered to your table. You can unlock food choices and options from paper menus and customize your own meal. You could then create your own food favorites list. BAM! Just like in the music business where you can purchase one song at a time and create your own play lists.

In the lobby of my medical doctor's office, they are promoting their new electronic patient records system and the benefits it offers patients. This is huge! BAM! If any of you have had to deal with multiple doctors, multiple tests, multiple locations, multiple prescriptions and multiple treatments, then you already know how obviously valuable electronic patient records and how much potential there is for positive benefits. I would change doctors to get the listed benefits! The competitive environment suddenly is shifting from bedside manners to digital capabilities.

I would encourage everyone in every industry to take a long hard look at what SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) trends and digital transformations are doing and will do to the traditional way your business operates and how this will impact the competitive landscape of your industry.

For more information on digital transformation and how these changes are impacting industries, markets and businesses, I would invite you to visit, www.unevenlydistributed.com.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

How Digital Leaders are Different

The 3 Tsunamis of Digital Transformation - Be Prepared

Robots, AI and the Next 40 Months

Wake Up! Your Business Has Changed!

Mobile Expert Interviews: Vaidy Iyer on Cloud Mobility and PaaS

Digitizing Beds - Is Your Enterprise in Jeopardy of Digital Transformations?

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

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