Showing posts with label digital technologies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital technologies. Show all posts

Video Interview: Kevin Benedict on Digital Transformation

I had the honor of recently being interviewed by two hip, nordic, brilliant and blond millennials from Finland - Kati Lehmuskoski and Timo Savolainen.  In addition to making me feel old and frumpy, we covered digital transformation from many different angles, and explored its impact on competition, leadership and the future.



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Kevin Benedict
View my profile on LinkedIn
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel
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.

What Artificial Intelligence Can Teach Us

Most of us understand that artificial intelligence (AI) offers opportunities for productivity improvements in the form of speed, automation, standardized actions and responses, plus the opportunity for continuous improvements via machine learning. These opportunities are enabled by data inputs that are analyzed and processed through AI algorithms that execute a desired decision and action. For all of the great capabilities and benefits that AI can provide, there is also a potential dark side. AI solutions can easily codify our prejudices, bias, gender stereotypes and promote injustices intentionally or unintentionally. This threat, as real and serious as it is, can also be seen as an opportunity to evaluate who we are, what we want the future to look like, and then codify a better tomorrow.

The 7 Imperatives for Thriving During Digital Transformation

Center for Digital Intelligence
These days it's not hard to identify the challenges organizations are facing during today's rapid business and digital transformation.  What's more difficult is knowing how to succeed.  The following recommendations are the result of our analysis after interviewing 37 executives and over 80 high tech professionals involved in digital technologies.
  1. Develop and monitor your own digital mindset and that of your organization's: Understand the need to continuously upgrade and update your own thinking, as well as your organization’s.  Accept that digital technologies and a connected world are here to stay, and that the path to business success resides in them. Understand digital technologies and their capabilities, and rethink every aspect of your business, and business strategy, with a digital mindset.
  2. Recognize the role culture plays in being successful in three key areas: your leadership, institutional and customer culture.  Purposely develop a digital culture that accepts and embraces the rapid pace of change that comes with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Analyst Kevin Benedict Interviews OSIsoft's Sam Lakkundi on Industrial IoT Platforms


What makes an Industrial Internet of Things platform different from any other IoT platform?  How is real-time data treated differently from data that can be archived and analyzed later?  What role does AI play in IIoT?  All these questions and more are covered in this interview with OSIsoft's Sam Lakkundi.  Enjoy!



Read more articles and watch more interviews at C4DIGI.com.

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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.

Time Continuums as a Competitive Advantage in Digital Transformation

We humans have a finite speed at which we think, analyze and make decisions that is largely determined by biology, chemistry and physics.  These limitations were not a problem when business was conducted largely by face-to-face interactions with other humans.  Today, however, in the digital age, businesses must operate in “digital” and ultimately in “future” time. Here’s a closer look at these different time continuums:

Human time: Time governed by our biological and mental limitations as humans. We can only focus on a small set of data before our minds are overwhelmed.  When important decisions must be made, our brains need time, significant time, to weigh all the variables, pros and cons and possible outcomes in order to arrive at a good decision.  In times of high stress when making fast decisions is required, many of us don’t perform at our peak.  In addition, weak humans that we are, we need sleep.  We are not always available; we require daily downtime in order to function.

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.

Culture as a Competitive Advantage in Digital Transformation

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.

Digital Transformation and Leadership Development

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
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.

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:

  1. Combinatorial Nature of Digital Technologies and Legos
  2. Digital Transformation from 40,000 feet
  3. Winning in Chaos - Digital Leaders
  4. 13 Recommended Actions for Digital Transformation in Retail
  5. Mistakes in Retail Digital Transformation
  6. Winning Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
  7. Digital Transformation - Mindset Differences
  8. Analyzing Retail Through Digital Lenses
  9. Digital Thinking and Beyond!
  10. Measuring the Pace of Change in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
  11. How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards
  12. To Bot, or Not to Bot
  13. Oils, Bots, AI and Clogged Arteries
  14. Artificial Intelligence Out of Doors in the Kingdom of Robots
  15. How Digital Leaders are Different
  16. The Three Tsunamis of Digital Transformation - Be Prepared!
  17. Bots, AI and the Next 40 Months
  18. You Only Have 40 Months to Digitally Transform
  19. Digital Technologies and the Greater Good
  20. Video Report: 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation
  21. Report: 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation
  22. Virtual Moves to Real in with Sensors and Digital Transformation
  23. Technology Must Disappear in 2017
  24. Merging Humans with AI and Machine Learning Systems
  25. In Defense of the Human Experience in a Digital World
  26. Profits that Kill in the Age of Digital Transformation
  27. Competing in Future Time and Digital Transformation
  28. Digital Hope and Redemption in the Digital Age
  29. Digital Transformation and the Role of Faster
  30. Digital Transformation and the Law of Thermodynamics
  31. Jettison the Heavy Baggage and Digitally Transform
  32. Digital Transformation - The Dark Side
  33. Business is Not as Usual in Digital Transformation
  34. 15 Rules for Winning in Digital Transformation
  35. The End Goal of Digital Transformation
  36. Digital Transformation and the Ignorance Penalty
  37. Surviving the Three Ages of Digital Transformation
  38. The Advantages of an Advantage in Digital Transformation
  39. From Digital to Hyper-Transformation
  40. Believers, Non-Believers and Digital Transformation
  41. Forces Driving the Digital Transformation Era
  42. Digital Transformation Requires Agility and Energy Measurement
  43. A Doctrine for Digital Transformation is Required
  44. Digital Transformation and Its Role in Mobility and Competition
  45. Digital Transformation - A Revolution in Precision Through IoT, Analytics and Mobility
  46. Competing in Digital Transformation and Mobility
  47. Ambiguity and Digital Transformation
  48. Digital Transformation and Mobility - Macro-Forces and Timing
  49. 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.

Interviews with Kevin Benedict