Will Force Win Wills?

Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before - or to self-destruct. ~ Future of Life Institute 

As Russian military forces invaded the Ukraine in an unconscionable act of violence and devastation, their armies of social media operators joined in and were deployed to the internet to digitally influence the opinions and will of the world watching in horror.  The goal of these operators was to influence their own people to support their aggressions through disinformation, while demoralizing their adversaries, and confusing a worldwide audience with disinformation to prevent them from acting or interfering.

Kyle Chayka recently wrote in the New Yorker, “the invasion of Ukraine is by no means the first conflict to play out over social media, but it is perhaps the first war to be mediated primarily by content creators and live-streamers rather than by traditional news organizations.”  Because social media operators are now the major source of news for many if not most, this has become a hugely important and strategic digital battlefield.   

What is the Destination of Technological Progress?

Definition of Progress – a forward movement toward a destination.

I have spent several decades working in and around the Silicon Valley where progress is measured by how many new ideas you can get funded, developed, scaled and sold.  The problem is Silicon Valley’s definition of progress is controlled by a relatively small group of investors focused on ROI.  I don’t think it’s such a good idea for investors to be the guardians of our progress or its destination.  Human progress is more than investor returns.  It should include a longer and better-quality life for a larger proportion of people, equality and justice.  Many of these qualities, however, don’t attract a lot of VC money.

When the destination for progress is good - humanity benefits.  We must all remember that the past wasn’t so great, and progress helped us improve it.   Analyst Marian L. Tupy described it as follows, “For most of human history, life was very difficult. People lacked basic medicines and died relatively young. They had no painkillers and people with ailments spent much of their lives in agonizing pain. Entire families lived in bug‐infested dwellings that offered neither comfort nor privacy. They worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset yet hunger and famines were commonplace. Transportation was primitive and most people never traveled beyond their native villages or nearest towns. Ignorance and illiteracy were rife. The “good old days” were, by and large, very bad for the great majority of humankind.” 

Reading Tupy’s description of our history helps us clearly understand the value of progress, but what happens when the destination of progress takes us in the wrong direction?  A direction that does not benefit humanity.  Many proponents of globalization would describe it as progress, yet it opened the door to a deadly and widespread pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands and shut-down the global economy.  Others call robots, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and digital commerce progress, but they may eliminate millions of jobs, causing despair and increasing income inequality.  

Many of the largest investors and technology companies today, the ones with the most money, are choosing our destination and defining progress without our vote.  A destination designed to maximize their revenue, rather than the destination offering the most good for humanity.  It seems to me that guiding progress and selecting our destination are two things that are far too important to leave up to investors or the invisible hands of the market.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught us many lessons.  Lean and long global supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions, pandemics require pre-developed plans and actions, viruses can shutdown entire economies, finding and developing a working vaccine and successful treatments require global collaboration and investment, testing and manufacturing and many other things.  Progress with a purpose to improve the human condition is far more important than progress to maximize investor ROI.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies 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.

A Deep Dive into Influencer Marketing and Strategies with SAP's Ursula Ringham

In this interview I recorded with SAP's Ursula Ringham, she shares her insights and experiences operating in one of the largest and most sophisticated influencer marketing organizations anywhere. She details SAP’s thinking around influencer marketing and how it operates. If you are a marketer wanting to organize an influencer marketing effort, this interview is for you.

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Kevin Benedict

SVP Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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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 Expert Interviews: Ian Bresnahan, CEO Itential on Digital Transformation in Networking

In this episode, I have the privilege of interviewing the co-founder and CEO of Itential, Ian Bresnahan, on the role of networks in helping and/or hindering digital transformation initiatives.  Digital transformation is often closely related to making a company more agile – able to act and react to changing customer and market requirements quickly.  Networks are what connects all the different systems and processes together, so having the ability to quickly change systems and processes utilizing networks takes special planning, solutions and strategies.   I found this topic fascinating and am sure you will to.



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Kevin Benedict

SVP Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

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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 and Marketing Leadership: SAP Hybris' Global VP, Strategy and Solution Management, Jackie Palmer

In this episode we discuss digital marketing strategy and SAP Hybris with Jackie Palmer, Global VP, Strategy and Solution Management at SAP.  If you are not familiar with SAP Hybris, it is SAP’s platform for customer engagement and commerce that includes five distinct areas: marketing, sales automation, customer service, commerce/e-commerce and customer data cloud.  Enjoy!


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Kevin Benedict

SVP Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

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.

Digital and Marketing Leadership: SAP's CDMO Mika Yamamoto

In this episode, I have the privilege of interviewing SAP’s Chief Digital Marketing Officer, Mika Yamamoto about SAP’s marketing strategies.  We discuss why SAP decided to separate the CDMO role from CMO, and what each of their responsibilities are.   Spoiler Alert – The CMO watches after the SAP brand and aims to make it a top-10 global brand, while the CDMO focuses on demand generation and customer retention.  We also explore how SAP supports the EU requirements for GDPR, the global data protection regulation, and how it can actually be turned into a competitive advantage.  Enjoy!


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Kevin Benedict

SVP Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

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.

Next Gen Digital Transformation Shakes Things Up Again!

What if you could closely measure your retail competitor’s in-store sales every day?  What if you could be alerted when competitors were increasing or decreasing production at different factories or ordering more materials?  Would that be valuable?  If it were possible, how would it change your strategies and the way you operated?

Intelligence capabilities that in the past were available only to nation-states are now available to commercial organizations through services provided by companies like Orbital Insight.  They partner with a wide range of satellite and other geospatial data collection companies to aggregate and analyze data, using artificial intelligence and data science to provide near-real-time insights. One of their products monitors over 260,000 retail parking lots from space. They use artificial intelligence to count and measure the number of cars in the lots and analyze time sequences to understand how the number of cars fluctuates over time.  This helps them understand if sales are increasing or decreasing in a particular location.  Isn’t that crazy to think about?  But think about it we should.  This is the next generation of business intelligence.  Put on your James Bond suit or dress, order a drink, and prepare for the next generation of digital transformation.

Satellite imagery can also help monitor fleets of trucks, warehouse activities, crops, plant health, highway traffic, construction projects and activities, oil field operations and oil storage levels, mines, logging, shipping and much more.  It’s important for business leaders to understand what is possible today, and what is being used by other digitally-mature competitors.  Intelligence gathering and analysis methodologies first developed by military and intelligence agencies, such as activity-based analysis and patterns of life analysis, will soon be critical skills for businesses.

All of these capabilities are being productized and/or offered as subscription services.  What makes it possible?  The commercialization of space as a result of massive numbers of new satellites being launched, producing massive volumes of new data, transmitted across incredibly fast wireless networks and then analyzed and interpreted by artificial intelligence.

It is also important to know that satellites support many different types of sensors.  They can include infrared thermal sensors to detect different heat signatures.  They may include hyperspectral sensors to detect different minerals, terrestrial vegetation and man-made materials.  Each new generation of satellite includes new types of sensors capable of collecting new forms of data.

The real insight here is the way combinations of newly-available data sources plus artificial intelligence will make possible new and additional waves of digital transformation.  Digital transformation is most certainly a journey not a destination.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

View my profile on LinkedIn

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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.

Digitally Transforming the Customer Experience

We have been traveling a lot lately. Why? Here at Regalix, we help large global companies with their customer success and sales enablement initiatives, which include things like digital marketing, knowledge management, customer experiences, sales operations, customer service and support, rewards and loyalty programs, etc., all of which are critical to the business and are today being digitally transformed. While helping businesses transform themselves in these areas we have seen and learned a great deal. Let me share some of the lessons we have learned.

Leadership: The Plan for Winning in Digital Transformation

Last year the World Economic Forum labeled 2017 as the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What value do we gain from defining industrial revolutions? I believe it is to define new sets of rules for winning in business. Let’s review the three previous industrial revolutions.

• Industrial Revolution #1. We move from reliance on animals, human muscles and biomass to the use of fossil fuels and mechanical power. A caveman/businessman wishing for a competitive advantage might be the first to use mechanical power fueled by fossil fuels to build cave-condos faster and cheaper than other Neanderthals.
• Industrial Revolution #2. Electricity is harnessed and distributed, both wireless and wired communication is developed, the synthesis of ammonia provides new fertilizers and harvests increase, and new forms of power generation are developed. A farmer wishing for competitive advantages could adopt mobile phones to communicate wirelessly with their workers, use lights around the farm to extend hours of operation, fertilizers could increase their production.
• Industrial Revolution #3. Digital systems are developed, communication and rapid advances in computing power achieved, which enable new ways of generating, processing and sharing information. A businessman operating a disco and seeking competitive advantages installs a digital cash register for more accurate cash management, buys an Apple Computer with the VisiCalc spreadsheet to better manage the business, and installs a heavy printer to print disco-oriented newsletters and other business documents from the office.
• Industrial Revolution #4. Billions of humans are connected by mobile devices and networks, surrounded by sensors, wearing wearables, supported by unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, which serves as the springboard for developments in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing. A business woman seeking a competitive advantage decides to develop and rent out genetically-altered and custom-designed farm animals with embedded GPS sensors to urban dwellers by developing a mobile app connected to the internet where chatbots take your reservation and deliver the beasts in autonomous self-driving trucks pulling cattle trailers.

An Executive's 2018 Checklist for Digital Transformation

“The size of competitors and the longevity of their brands, are less predictive of future success than the importance they give to data, the quality and speed of their information logistics systems, and the operational tempo of their business.” ~Kevin Benedict

More data is being generated today than ever before, and in 2018 leaders should be laser focused on investing in and implementing the following digital systems/solutions:

• Data collection
• Big data analytics
• AI/Machine learning
• Automation (RPA)
• Security
• Real-time contextually relevant personalized experiences

There is a new sense of urgency today as businesses realize data is the blood that runs through the veins of a successful business in this digital era, and that data has a shelf life, and the value of it diminishes rapidly over time.  In an always-connected world where consumers and their needs are transient, timing is everything and a special type of data is needed – real-time data. In order to capture competitive advantages and contextual relevance before data expires, enterprises must deploy optimized information logistics systems (OILS) that deliver on the potential fast enough to exploit it.

Rethinking Education in the Digital Age

Center for Digital Intelligence™

Have you considered how the traditional textbook author/publisher, teacher, student and parent relationship should change as a result of digital transformation?  In this article let's explore how this traditional process can be greatly enhanced with digital technologies.  Traditionally a physical textbook is published in one format for all students.  Sometimes, at a great expense, they can be translated to another language.  There are several challenges with that.  Not all students learn in the same manner or language, physical textbooks can only use images and texts on paper, and today's students are more accustomed to accessing, reading, watching and listening to content in a digital format on smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Digital formats, however, can be integrated with all kinds of digital media.  The devices or hardware that reads digital formats (smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.) also mostly support GPS and mapping.  With GPS sensors, authors can integrate location data from Google Field Trips, to make their textbooks location-aware and more contextually relevant to the reader.  For example a student could be reading about Lewis and Clark's explorations, and their digital textbook could automatically show them nearby locations, photos, video clips, notes, podcasts, etc., related to that journey.  In addition, virtual reality and augmented reality applications could then be created to bring historic events to life.

Making the Hard Decisions in Digital Transformation

How can an organization with decades worth of accumulated ERP customizations and configurations, IT systems and customized software applications digitally transform fast enough to keep up with the rapidly changing behaviors of digital customers? That is a hard question most organizations are wrestling with today.  Often complex custom IT environments served a purpose in a past era, but today where IT speed and agility are required, they serve as anchors restraining an organization from moving forward and digitally transforming fast enough to compete.

Like a CEO that closes down or sells a profitable business unit because it no longer fits with where the organization is going, CTOs and CIOs must rapidly shut down or replace IT systems and processes that no longer support the reality of today, or the vision of the future based on the best information available today - not yesterday. Keeping an outdated IT system or business process for the purpose of achieving a positive return on the original investment is a strategy based on pride, not logic.

New Rules for Start-Ups in the Age of Digital Transformation

I have had the opportunity to work for and around a good many start-ups during the course of my career.  Often the start-up founders would simply define a problem, develop a solution and launch a company.  The marketing department would then do their very best to identify the individuals in each target company that experienced the problem and had a budget to fix it.  This was always a challenging task, but it is even harder today.

Today, start-ups must not only identify a problem that needs solved, but they must compete against "digital transformation" initiatives in both the business and IT organizations that are trying to reduce complexity through the elimination of applications, customized software solutions, IT systems, multiple instances of ERPs and vendors.

The goal of many organizations today is to simplify the IT environment, and to make business processes much faster and agile.  I see many companies seeking to standardize on a handful of platforms like Salesforce.com, SAP, Adobe, Ariba, SuccessFactor, etc. Too many systems in an IT inventory, means too much complexity and the increased risk that data will be compromised, and that systems will be too expensive to maintain, secure and upgrade.  In this age of fast changing digital consumer behaviors, flexibility and simplicity equal organizational speed to keep up with their markets.

What is the answer for start-ups?  Start-up solutions must appeal to the digital transformation goals of their target customers.  It means their solution must be cloud based and automatically upgraded to stay aligned with customer's core platforms and systems.  It means offering artificial intelligence enabled robotic process automation, chatbots and machine learning that can improve predictability, simplify complexity and eliminate troublesome areas of service and performance.  It must not result in any additional layers of complexity, rather new solutions need to solve big problems, while at the same time reducing complexity, and increasing agility and the operational tempo of the business.



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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

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Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Technologies

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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.

Combinatorial Nature of Digital Technologies and Legos

I came across the brilliant blog site of Futurist Frank Diana this week.  In one of his most recent articles he discusses the concept of combinatorial nature.  He states, "We are seeing exponential convergence across the areas of science, technology, economics, society, ethics, and politics. The combinatorial nature of an overwhelming number of building blocks drives an accelerating intersection across these areas."  As an expert Lego player, I can appreciate the concept of building blocks, and the near infinite number of combinations these blocks can be used to form.  The idea that we have now reached a critical mass of digital building blocks, and that we will now experience exponential growth through the combinatorial nature of them is compelling.

The World Economic Forum also describes the future in similar ways, “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before... Billions of people are now connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge.  And these possibilities are being multiplied by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing."

Both of these quotes, and the idea that we have reached a new era as a result of the combinatorial nature of digital building blocks, begs the question of what does this mean for for our organizations today?  The answer can be found in the Lego block.

Legos come in standardized shapes, sizes and integration points that allow for the rapid build of billions of different combinations.  The standardization of Lego blocks doesn't restrict our ability to create new and unique combinations, rather it enhances it. Organizations must recognize that the winners of today and tomorrow are not organizations that create their own bespoke building blocks, but that have the vision to use standardized digital building blocks to offer unique combinations faster than their opponents.

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

1. Digital Transformation from 40,000 feet
2. Winning in Chaos - Digital Leaders
3. 13 Recommended Actions for Digital Transformation in Retail
4. Mistakes in Retail Digital Transformation
5. Winning Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
6. Digital Transformation - Mindset Differences
7. Analyzing Retail Through Digital Lenses
8. Digital Thinking and Beyond!
9. Measuring the Pace of Change in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
10. How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards
11. To Bot, or Not to Bot
12. Oils, Bots, AI and Clogged Arteries
13. Artificial Intelligence Out of Doors in the Kingdom of Robots
14. How Digital Leaders are Different
15. The Three Tsunamis of Digital Transformation - Be Prepared!
16. Bots, AI and the Next 40 Months
17. You Only Have 40 Months to Digitally Transform
18. Digital Technologies and the Greater Good
19. Video Report: 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation
20. Report: 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation
21. Virtual Moves to Real in with Sensors and Digital Transformation
22. Technology Must Disappear in 2017
23. Merging Humans with AI and Machine Learning Systems
24. In Defense of the Human Experience in a Digital World
25. Profits that Kill in the Age of Digital Transformation
26. Competing in Future Time and Digital Transformation
27. Digital Hope and Redemption in the Digital Age
28. Digital Transformation and the Role of Faster
29. Digital Transformation and the Law of Thermodynamics
30. Jettison the Heavy Baggage and Digitally Transform
31. Digital Transformation - The Dark Side
32. Business is Not as Usual in Digital Transformation
33. 15 Rules for Winning in Digital Transformation
34. The End Goal of Digital Transformation
35. Digital Transformation and the Ignorance Penalty
36. Surviving the Three Ages of Digital Transformation
37. The Advantages of an Advantage in Digital Transformation
38. From Digital to Hyper-Transformation
39. Believers, Non-Believers and Digital Transformation
40. Forces Driving the Digital Transformation Era
41. Digital Transformation Requires Agility and Energy Measurement
42. A Doctrine for Digital Transformation is Required
43. Digital Transformation and Its Role in Mobility and Competition
44. Digital Transformation - A Revolution in Precision Through IoT, Analytics and Mobility
45. Competing in Digital Transformation and Mobility
46. Ambiguity and Digital Transformation
47. Digital Transformation and Mobility - Macro-Forces and Timing
48. Mobile and IoT Technologies are Inside the Curve of Human Time

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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.

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Digital Transformation Crunch Time

Consumer behaviors are changing at speeds never before seen in many industries, which is impacting how businesses operate and bring products to market. In fact, more than a dozen retailers have closed this year as a result of having business and IT systems, and supply chains that are unable to meet the speed requirements of digital consumers. Most companies report they have 
IT systems in their inventory that are too slow or incapable of supporting real-time digital consumers.  That spells trouble.  Consumer and competitive changes are forcing enterprises to rethink their strategies in order to speed up in just about all areas: R&D, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and sales.

Enterprises that I speak with today seem to understand that the need for digital transformation is being driven by advances in mobile technologies, automation, cloud computing, sensors, big data analytics and artificial intelligence.   They realize they must upgrade their IT systems and business processes to accommodate these changes and increase the speed of their operations.  They are also focused on how to improve their agility and flexibility, so they are nimble enough to respond to changing consumer behaviors, tastes and new competitors.  Many companies today find themselves in a position where their past investments in IT systems, that once provided competitive advantages, are now anchors preventing them from moving into the future.

Achieving real-time operational speeds is required to support real-time digital interactions and experiences.  Supporting these real-time experiences is more than just a technology issue, it requires companies to support real-time analytics, decision-making and business operational tempos. An operational tempo,
 in the context of this article, is defined as the speed or pace of business operations. Achieving a faster operational tempo is a significant challenge for many.  This is why we are seeing more applications of real-time analytics, automation and artificial intelligence.

Changing an enterprise’s operational tempo requires strong leadership that can transform the entire organization. It often requires significant IT updates and upgrades, organizational changes, and reengineering business processes and decision-making matrixes to align with real-time demands.

The biggest challenge for legacy companies today, is how to move to real-time.

On the 20^th of July I will be leading an online discussion with the CIO WaterCooler on "Sequencing Digital Technologies for Competitive Advantages 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.

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