Digital Twins and Instantaneous Decision-making

The reality of information is entirely contained in the speed of its dissemination. ~ Paul Virilio

Even the best data has a shelf life.  Its value diminishes quickly with the passing of time.  In a world of moving customers, employees, vehicles, subcontractors, materials, suppliers, etc., knowing what is happening at a precise time is critical for decision-making, scheduling and planning.  If some information is 90 minutes old, other information is 45 minutes old, and still other information is available in real-time - you are going to have a real challenge integrating that information and forming an accurate and clear picture of reality at a particular moment!

Optimal efficiency and accuracy in the scenario above can only be achieved when the speed of information collection and dissemination is coordinated and in near real-time.  This means having networks and sensors in place to capture data, and integrating it to present an accurate digital twin of reality - in real-time.

For many industries the quality of their information logistics systems, the speed at which decision-making occurs, and the immediacy of actions taken form the new competitive playing field.  In history, many of the greatest battles were won or lost based on the accuracy and timeliness of the information used to decide how best to maneuver armies, navies and air forces.  Enterprises today are in a similar position.

Legacy IT systems that are incapable of supporting a real-time information capturing, transmitting, processing, analyzing, decision-making and acting environment will not survive long in the future.

In the past, long-term planning was the ticket to success.  As the tempo of business increases, short-term planning becomes increasingly important.  Today, nothing short of real-time is good enough to compete in a hyper-competitive global market, and increasingly the ability to project oneself into the future and to start making decisions today about what is seen in the future is necessary.

Today the efficient and real-time coordination of multiple moving parts is mandatory.  That means sensor technologies have become an absolute requirement on the front-end, and IT systems that can support real-time and future time on the back-end.  

What needs to change in your organization to support real-time planning, real-time decision-making, and acting on it?  Real-time decision-making in complex environments today requires AI and automation.  More on that soon...

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Operational Tempo and Speed as a Competitive Advantage

The concept of speed as an advantage is not new. Over the course of 700 years, the Romans built and maintained a system of roads extending over 55,000 miles to enable speedy communications and the quick movement of troops and supplies across the vast expanse of the empire. 

Today digital technologies have altered our perception of time and space while expanding our expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time. We expect to accomplish one hour's worth of shopping in a brick and mortar supermarket, in seconds shopping online. These expectations significantly impact the way businesses must operate in a digital era to compete and remain relevant. 

Digital Transformation and Competitive Decision-Making

The winning trinity in competitive decision-making includes people, ideas and things according to the renowned military strategist John Boyd. Although competitive decision-making is not yet an Olympic sport, it affects us all.  Leaders (people) must become trained experts at using digital technologies to make fast decisions.  Leaders must use the right strategies and methodologies (ideas) to make wise decisions fast, and they must collect the needed data and analyze it fast enough using the best solutions (things).  If any component of this trinity is weak, it will be hard to compete.

In a recent survey of high tech VP level and above executives that I conducted, few companies have a formal training program in place to help develop their leaders to be skilled at digital transformation and competitive decision-making.  Most enterprises are just rolling the dice on the skill levels of their leadership.  Given the emerging challenges that digital transformation introduces to a complex business, I would strongly advise companies to invest in formal digital leadership development.

Some of the key goals of digital transformation are to speed up and improve interactions with digital customers, and to be able to react faster to new information.  As digital technologies (things) provide more real-time data, and real-time data analysis, new strategies (ideas) for making real-time decisions must be implemented by leaders (people) or their proxies.  In the future, more and more proxies involved in real-time decision-making will be in the form of robotic process automation systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Any business process where there is a documented best practice for how best to respond to various data inputs can be automated.  As data inputs become more real-time, human leadership decision-making becomes the source of latency in the system.  I predict that decision-making will increasingly be a source of competition, and that decisions will soon be divided into those where there is a defined best option already which allows for rapid automation, and those that have ill-defined options and require humans' capacity for creativity to solve.

My latest video from the field:

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Kevin Benedict

President, Principal Analyst, Futurist, the Center for Digital Intelligence™

Website C4DIGI.com

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.