Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future: digital strategies

Showing posts with label digital strategies. Show all posts

Precision as a Competitive Advantage in Digital Transformation

Throughout history military leaders have suffered through the "fog of war," where they desperately sought answers to six key questions:

• Where are my enemies?
• Where are my friends?
• Where are my forces?
• Where are my materials and supplies?
• What capabilities are available now and at what location?
• What are the environmental conditions?

These “unknowns” impacted the strategies and tactics military leaders employed. Their time and energy as leaders were heavily focused on defending themselves against these unknowns.

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 across the vast expanse of the empire.

What’s different today is that digital technologies have warped our perception of time. As an example, a person might say they live five minutes from town, but that can have widely different meanings based on whether they were referring to walking or driving a car. Digital technologies compress our perception of time and space while expanding our expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time. We expect to complete the equivalent of one hour of shopping in a supermarket in one minute online. These changes significantly impact the way businesses must operate in a digital era to compete and remain relevant.

The human work of solving problems, facing challenges and overcoming obstacles tends to share a common goal: creating stable, secure and predictable environments. The tendency for most humans is that once we solve a challenge, we want to be done with it. That propensity, however, does not fit with today’s reality of perpetual change.

In the digital business world, organizations have no choice but to operate in an unclear, uncertain and continuously shifting environment that requires a new mindset and approach to formulating business strategies. Digital winners recognize that change is part of the game, and that they need to develop ways to exploit continuous ambiguity. In fact, in our surveys of high-tech professionals, when we asked how long they thought digital transformation initiatives would last, about one-third of the surveyed technology professionals answered “forever” – and as we all know, forever is a long, long time.

Any significant business process that can be documented and best practices identified - will be. Any defined process that can be standardized - will be. Standardized processes that can be codified and automated (through robotic software automation), will be - if the volume justifies it. If the process is repeatable across many companies it will be offered as a shared service on a platform in a cloud.

If you agree with these technology maxims, then you are likely to agree that most existing business processes offer little competitive advantages in the long run, and the advantages of new innovations are fleeting so must be captured early. They will eventually become part of a shared services platform followed and used by your competitors. For example, 20 and 40 foot shipping containers offered a competitive advantage for shipping companies and ports that were early adopters, but only for a very short period of time. After a quick few years the entire world standardized on them and the competitive advantage disappeared.

I have read several articles recently about projects designed to teach digital systems to think more like humans. For example one article was about teaching chatbot systems to communicate empathy to humans. It seems ironic that we are developing digital systems to think more like humans, while at the same time much of my work is focused on teaching humans how to think more like and about digital systems and their capabilities. Let me explain.

Competitive battles in most industries today are increasingly centered on digital technologies and digital strategies, and as a result, it benefits leaders to have a deep understanding of how digital systems work, and how the impact of new digital innovations will change the behaviors of customers, competitors and partners.

A few of the areas that I think leaders should really understand are:

Simple programming concepts and computer logic
Small World, social networks and swarming theories
Industry and technology data exchange standards
Platforms, Cloud computing, Containers and System thinking
Internet and network architecture and design
Big Data and real-time analytics
GPS, GIS and Mapping
Mobile and wireless technologies
Sensors, embedded wireless devices and IoT
Data and device security and authentication
Databases and data lifecycle management
Online catalogs, shopping carts and digital payments
Digital marketing, personalization and contextual relevance
Digital content and delivery: websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, social media (e.g. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
Robotics, automation, AI and machine learning
Virtual and augmented reality

There are many more items that could be added to this short list, but I hope you get the idea. If we can agree that digital technologies are fundamental to our future success, then we must understand them, or at least their capabilities.

To read more about how digital transformation is impacting strategies read this article 15 Rules for Winning During the Age of Digital Transformation.

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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.

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

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Technologies

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***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.

Brain Change and Digital Strategies

The renowned military strategist John Boyd taught that people and institutions collect favorite philosophies, strategies, theories and ideologies over a period of time, and then try to align the future to fit them. The problem with this is the future is rarely like the past, and trying to fit new data into old paradigms often forces us to perform irrational mental gymnastics, which leaves us farther from the truth.

Our resistance to change and unwillingness to question our beliefs in the face of mounting evidence, leads us to analytical and execution failure. A more productive habit would be to continuously review our mental constructs to find out how to modify our interpretations to align with new evidence. This action, however, goes against our human nature that seeks stability and resists change. We see the consequences of these challenges weekly as we read about companies (especially retail) failing as a result of their resistance. In the future, developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning will have the potential to help us overcome many of our own mental weaknesses that cause us problems in our pursuit of truth.

In the digital era, our ability to change our thinking becomes even more critical as it must happen at a faster rate. I remember when updates to an enterprise’s mobile apps required all users to bring their mobile devices into the office to get them loaded and tested. This was a slow, tedious and expensive process. Today, as we all know, this can be done worldwide instantly and for very little money through cloud based app stores. Digital transformation equals speed and accelerated change.

In a world of integrated digital platforms and systems, new digital innovations can impact markets instantly and competitors must be able to react.

The bottom line - one of the biggest factors determining the digital transformation winners of tomorrow will be the brains of leaders – their mental constructs. Can executives and boards look at new evidence and innovations without biases, resistance to change and prejudices, and grasp how economies, industries, markets and competition will be impacted? Can they learn about new digital innovations, understand the breadth of the impact, and develop new business strategies based on the new realities? Can they overcome themselves?

It is quite the irony that digital winners will be not simply those with the best digital technologies, but those that can best overcome their own human brains.

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I invite you to watch my latest video on digital technology trends.

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict, connect with me on LinkedIn or read more of my articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

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

Website C4DIGI.com

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Technologies

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***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.

Announcement: Sequencing Digital Technology Implementations Over the Next 40 Months

On the 20^th of July I will be leading an online discussion with the CIO WaterCooler on "Sequencing Digital Technologies Over the Next 40 Months of Digital Transformation".

At my Digital Boardroom we will be discussing that we (consumers) have all changed as a result of digital and mobile technologies and platforms. Enterprises must now follow and transform, in order to support these changes and compete fast enough to matter. If you agree with this premise, then an important question to ask is what sequence should digital technologies be implemented in order to maximize the ROI from digital transformation investments? Another important question is what enterprise business and IT doctrines should guide organizations through this transformation. These important questions and others will be discussed, and research findings shared. (Digital Boardrooms typically take approx. 45min)

If you’re a CIO or an IT leader and you’d like to participate you can register here: https://ciowatercooler.co.uk/digital-boardrooms/’

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Kevin Benedict

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

Website C4DIGI.com

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Technologies

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***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.

Profits that Kill in the Age of Digital Transformation

Presenting 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation in Lisbon, PT

Digital transformation initiatives both increase revenue and decrease expenses according to our upcoming study titled Work AHEAD 2016 by Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. For this study we surveyed over 2,000 executives across 18 countries. The expected net business impact over the next 3 years of rapid digital transformation, i.e. hyper-transformation, is an increase in revenue of 11.4% (Revenue = 10.3%, Costs = -1.3%) amongst the companies in our study. These numbers represent the difference between success and failure in many industries.

To get the predicted revenue impact, companies expect to increase their spending on digital technologies from 11.3% of their revenue today, to 16.6% of revenue by 2020, while decreasing their non-digital investments.

In addition, our study reveals 64% of the futurists in our study, experts paid to study digital technology trends and to develop future strategies, believe digital transformation will boost revenues by 2020, 76% believe it will strengthen their competitive positioning, and 88% believe it will accelerate their speed to market. If you accept these predictions, then your organization should quickly transform itself and jettison the heavy baggage that accumulates as a result of decades of institutionalized methodologies developed and codified in an analog era - an era operating at a far slower operational tempo. The good news is that ROIs (return on investments) from digital transformation initiatives are compelling. Nearly 30% of the surveyed firms are receiving an ROI greater than 100%.

These revenue numbers have investors interested and asking about the digital transformation plans of companies they invest in, or are considering investing in today. We have all read about the list of companies that have failed this year due in part to their slow and/or inadequate response to digital technologies and changing competitive marketplaces. As a result investors today want to understand the speed and scale of their portfolio’s digital transformation initiatives, as these initiatives can be predictors of future value.

For executives, transforming an enterprise is difficult at any time, but when an enterprise is highly profitable - digital transformation is even harder. Why? The temptation to follow the maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” is just too compelling. The challenge enterprises are faced with today, however, is that digital technologies are changing the competitive landscape faster and in different ways than executives have ever seen before.

Recently, we presented a workshop on digital transformation strategies to a highly profitable automotive parts and systems manufacturer. The company is filled with smart people using efficient long standing manufacturing systems and processes. The company is innovative in R&D, and forward thinking in the adoption of digital technologies and strategies for their products and services.

The challenge we all faced in the room is how do we justify digital transformation investments, when today the old systems and ways of thinking pay out in record profits? How do we articulate that sensors, artificial intelligence, digital platforms and real-time data are taking on a whole new level of importance? In fact, executives believe big data and business analytics will have the biggest business impact of all technologies on businesses from years 2020-2025.

We were able to demonstrate, through an intensive brainstorming workshop, how a sensor enabled digital platform connected to their physical parts and equipment, and integrated with external databases could provide enormous customer and business value. We were able to show them how their current list of physical products and services, could be expanded by adding a whole new list of new digital products and services on top of their current offerings. The data they had access to in their physical products and solutions was unique and could offer significant value and competitive advantages if they made it available on a digital platform as a service. Our mission was accomplished.

Today an enterprise’s system for collecting, analyzing, reporting and sharing data is mission critical, especially given the increasing importance of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and machine learning to companies’ future success. The end-to-end system for managing this data we call the “optimized information logistics systems” or by its acronym, OILS. Having effective OILS is mandatory in order to become a digitally transformed enterprise (DTE). Digitally transformed enterprises place a premium on data collecting, analysis, situational awareness and real-time action and reaction. Executives see the value in OILS, as 63% believe analytics will have a very strong impact on work by 2020, and 62% predict OILS will significantly enhance decision-making over the next 5 years.

DTEs see where their resources are located, where they are needed and how best to manage them at all times to successfully and efficiently accomplish their mission. They see how customers are using their products and how they are holding up. Real-time connectivity combined with OILS enables organizations to think, act and compete in real-time, a capability never before possible. It enables products in the field to be intimately tied to R&D and the manufacturing floor. It is a whole new world, which in spite of profits today, must be anticipated and invested in for tomorrow, or the profits of today might lead to the death of them tomorrow.

Authors: Tim Hillison, Senior Director, Cognizant Digital Works, and Kevin Benedict, Senior Analyst, Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work

*Source The Work Ahead, 2016, Cognizant Center for the Future of Work

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 Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin'sYouTube 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.

In Defense of the Human Experience in Digital Transformation

Discussing Digital Strategies in Lisbon, PT

Last week, I was a keynote speaker at the Mobile Edge '16 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Following the conference I met individually with many different companies. These companies represented a variety of industries, sizes and digital maturity levels. I was sharing my latest digital strategy report findings, and then answering questions and brainstorming about what the data meant to each of them.

At the hotel, following a long day of meetings, it occurred to me that the biggest value I was bringing to these businesses was the breadth of my experience - the kind of experience that has turned my hair gray.

The report I was sharing was titled, “40-Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation.” This report was the result of surveying 2,000 global executives across 18 countries on the current impact of digital technologies on their business, and their expectations for future impact. In this report I wrote a lot about artificial intelligence and software robots. I wrote about how robotic process automation will change the role of processes, employees and managers.

While pondering my day over a hot drink, it occurred to me that the report and the data I shared could have been presented by a junior employee with good communication skills. The value my gray hair brought to the table was the ability to understand the back-story, the history, how today is different, and analyze what needs to be done today to prepare for tomorrow. It was perspective, experience and wisdom gained from many years of accumulated successes and failures. It was my human baggage that was so valuable. It allowed me to listen to many disparate situations and challenges, understand them, and then see a unique path to success for each. It allowed me to see their challenges in abstraction and define steps to follow. I chuckled and sipped my coffee. Just try to do that, I challenged all the bots and artificial intelligence engines I had been writing and speaking about. Just try to do that.

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 Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin'sYouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Competing in Future Time and Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is the process of transforming a business from one state to another - from a state where businesses operate in Human time, to a state that operates in Digital time and finally to Future time. Businesses today must digitally transform in order to compete in all three of these time continuums simultaneously.

Let’s first identify these different time continuums:

Human time – time governed by our physical, biological and mental limitations as humans
Digital time – time governed by computing, networking and data transmission speeds
Future time – time governed by predictive analytics, algorithms and artificial intelligence

Human time cannot compete with Digital time in a mobile and always connected world. Human time cannot deliver the real-time mobile and online commerce speeds that digital consumers require. For example, you can’t have a human responding to mobile search queries, or mobile payments, rather you need optimized information logistics systems (OILS) that are integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) enabled bots responding automatically in digital time.

Digital time refers to the speeds at which computer systems and networks operate. The goal being to reach speeds as close to real-time as possible by optimizing each connected system, component and process that touch data.

Future time is faster than real-time. It is the ability to anticipate needs, take actions and deliver content even before it is requested. It is the ability to automatically prepare for the future in a manner that adds value.

An OILS running in Future time, utilizes predictive analytics, algorithms and AI to provide an experience that anticipates the needs of the user in a manner that makes it nearly invisible to the user. For example turn-by-turn navigation supported by real-time traffic updates that route you around obstacles and problem areas. An OILS, running in Future time, can prepare personalized and contextually relevant experiences in advance.

I had the opportunity to work with a large global automotive system manufacturer this year. We explored extending traditional automotive systems to operate in Future time. They would integrate multiple external databases including traffic accident and insurance information, plus real-time weather and traffic information to automatically prepare the vehicle and driver for the road ahead. We were reaching into the future to provide additional value and a competitive advantage.

Future time delivers value from the future. It works in a time beyond “real-time.” This is the evolutionary nirvana for human to digital interactions. Businesses that have not digitally transformed in a manner that can harvest value from the future have no possibility of competing there.

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 Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Precision as a Competitive Advantage in Digital Transformation

Speed as a Competitive Advantage in Digital Transformation

Culture as a Competitive Advantage in Digital Transformation

Patterns, Platforms, Competitive Advantages and Automation

Digital Transformation and Leadership Development

Digital Transformation and Competitive Decision-Making

Brain Change and Digital Strategies

Announcement: Sequencing Digital Technology Implementations Over the Next 40 Months

Profits that Kill in the Age of Digital Transformation

In Defense of the Human Experience in Digital Transformation

Competing in Future Time and Digital Transformation

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

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