Digital Transformation Requires a Doctrine

Knights using Stirrups for Balance

In my 30+ years in the high tech industry I have often heard the business maxim, “Develop a business strategy first, and then find the technology to support it.” This teaching I have come to believe is wrong.

Let me support my argument by first asking a few questions.  What came first e-commerce or the Internet, mobile commerce or wireless networks, commercial airline travel or the airplane, knights in shiny armour being used as shock troops, or stirrups?  Answer: Stirrups of course!  Innovations and technology have a long history of appearing first, and then doctrines and strategies forming later.

What we are learning is if your outdated business doctrines and strategies are dictating the speed of your technology adoptions - you are in big trouble! The world is moving much too fast and organizations must now align the tempo of their business doctrine and strategy evolution with the pace of technology innovations and customer adoptions.

"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Being Faster than Real-Time is a Competitive Advantage

Competing in Future-Time

Businesses must continuously transform themselves to compete.  Why?  That is what their customers and competition are doing.  One of those areas of transformation involves competing in time.  Think about the impact of Amazon on shopping and delivery times!  All businesses operate in time, whether human, digital or future.  Businesses today must transform in order to successfully compete in all three of these time states simultaneously.

Let’s first discuss the definitions of these times:

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

The 18 Laws for Winning with Data, Speed and Mobility

I have given nine presentations in the past 10 days on mobile and data strategies.  I have met with companies in the energy, media, insurance and banking industries.  I have brainstormed and discussed these laws for winning with data, speed and mobility, and they have held up.  In the age of mobile me, where information is the prize, a new set of laws and strategies are required to win.  In my new report, "Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me," I discuss many of these laws and how they are applied in mobile apps and mobile commerce.

1. Data is the modern commercial battlefield.
2. Information dominance is the strategic goal.
3. Real-time operations and tempos are the targets.
4. Advantages in speed, analytics, business operational tempos determine the winners.
5. Real-time business speed is enabled by advances in mobile information, sensors and wireless communications.
6. Competition is now focused on optimizing information logistics systems (the systems involved in maximizing information advantages).
7. Businesses that can “understand and act with speed” dominate those which are slower. 
8. In order to win or gain superiority over competitors in the age of information, you must operate  information logistics systems at a faster tempo, and get inside your competitor's decision curves. (Adapted from John Boyd)
9. Situational awareness enables insights, innovations and operations to be conducted faster and at lower cost .
10. Principle of Acceleration & Mobility – As demand for mobile apps increases, an even greater demand for changes will occur across business processes, operations and IT.
11. The more data that is collected and analyzed, the greater the economic value and innovation opportunity it has in aggregate.
12. Data has a shelf-life, and the economic value of data diminishes quickly over time.
13. The economic value of information multiplies when combined with context and right time delivery.
14. Mobile apps provide only as much value as the systems behind them.
15. Full Spectrum Information: Winners will dominate by collecting, transmitting, analyzing, reporting and automating decision making faster and better.
16. The size of opponents and their systems and platforms are less representative of power today, than the quality of their sensor systems, mobile communication links and their ability to use information to their advantage.
17. Information is a new asset class, in that it has measurable economic value.  There are significant strategic, operational and financial reasons for investing in it, and optimizing it. (Douglas Laney, Gartner)
18. If I can develop and pursue my plan to defeat you faster than you can execute your plan to defeat me, then your plan in unimportant. ~ Robert Leonard

These laws need to be known, and their relevance intimately understood and applied to every aspect of business and IT today.

Download the new report "Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me" - http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Cutting-Through-Chaos-in-the-Age-of-Mobile-Me-codex1579.pdf

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Analyst and World Traveler

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***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.

Mobile Commerce, Speed, Operational Tempos and the Real-Time Enterprise, Part 3

This is part 3 in the article series.  Read part 1 and part 2 here.

The Shelf Life of Data and the Need for Speed

Today enterprises are facing a massive challenge that will require new strategies and investment. In fact, 80 percent of survey participants reported that increasing demand for mobile apps is forcing IT departments to rethink and change how they have designed IT environments.  Rethinking and changing IT environments requires investment and budget, and 83 percent believe the demand for mobile applications will force enterprises to make major investments in their IT environments to better support real-time interactions with mobile apps and to remain competitive.

Our survey reveals that real-time mobile data is critical for personalizing and optimizing the mobile user’s experience and promoting the adoption and utilization of mobile applications and websites. We have also found that organizations, IT environments, and business processes will require changes in order to support a faster operational tempo. One of the key reasons these changes are necessary is the shelf life of data. Data has greater economic value the faster it can be collected, transmitted, analyzed, consumed, and utilized. This brings us back to the speed requirement. If the mobile user can instantly be presented with a personalized and contextually relevant experience based on real-time and previously collected and analyzed data, then the user will realize the greatest value and utility.

Situational Awareness and Information Dominance

Military strategists today believe the size of opponents and their weapons platforms are less representative of military power than the quality of their sensors systems, mobile communication links, and their ability to utilize information to their advantage. We believe these same conclusions are also relevant in the commercial sector.

An enterprise’s ability to use information as a competitive advantage is central to a successful business strategy today. If a manager has the responsibility of optimizing the schedules of 5,000 service technicians during an ice storm, or routing 10,000 delivery trucks, then the faster they receive accurate data from the field - the better they can perform their jobs.

Information advantages often involve improving situational awareness — the ability to understand events and actions around you. This takes visibility and data. Visibility happens when people, mobile, and sensor data collection technologies are integrated with IT systems and processes that enable the measurement, collection, transmission, analysis, and reporting of remote activities and events. The faster this can be accomplished, the faster data-driven decisions can be made and tactics deployed.

Historically, it has been difficult to manage remote workforces due to a lack of visibility. There are too many unknowns and a lack of accountability, which forces managers to make decisions based upon conjecture, rather than on real-time data analysis. Robert L. Bateman writes in his book Digital War, “The three questions that have befuddled soldiers since the beginning of human history are:

1. Where am I?
2. Where are my buddies?
3. Where is the enemy?" 

Bateman speaks to the difficulty of managing from afar. The lack of real-time visibility often means critical operational decisions and optimized scheduling choices are delayed, which results in the inefficient utilization of resources and assets. Today technologies exist to eliminate many of those operational blind spots.

Network-Centric Operations and Data Collection

“The problem: Technology [used between WWI and WWII] was viewed in discrete packets as it applied to narrowly defined areas. As a result the US military did not fully develop the possible combinations of technology with tactics.” –Robert L. Bateman, Digital War

Many commercial organizations today retain the narrow view and strategy that Bateman wrote about. They continue to think about and deploy mobile and sensor technologies in line-of-business (LOB) silos. They believe in the utility of these technologies, but have no enterprise-wide strategy for combining mobile and sensor technologies with tactics to achieve an overall information advantage across the enterprise.

Modern military organizations use the term Network Centric Warfare strategies to describe an information-based strategy for winning wars. These strategies have been taught in military organizations for decades, but are less understood in the commercial sector, where these strategies can be found with names such as Network Centric Operations or Networked Field Services. Military organizations that have implemented Network Centric strategies are accustomed to using a wide range of mobile devices and sensors to create a web or grid of data collection capabilities that are all wirelessly networked together for the purpose of enhancing real-time situational awareness, organizational agility, collaboration, and decision-making. Commercial enterprises share many of the same requirements, but as our survey data shows, they have yet to adopt the necessary enterprise-wide strategies or IT systems with enough speed to support real-time interactions.

Given the importance of an information advantage, what should commercial organizations focus on in 2015 and beyond? Broadly the answers are:

• Recognizing that information can be used as a competitive advantage
• Recognizing the importance of achieving real-time operational tempos
• Developing and implementing enterprise-wide network centric operational strategies
• Utilizing mobile applications and sensors to reduce operational blind spots and improve situational awareness
• Personalizing and contextualizing the mobile user experience using real-time data and Code Halos strategies
• Employing artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the speed of decision-making and the execution of tactics

An organization’s ability to be competitive now and in the future largely depends on its ability to successfully navigate the process of digital and organizational transformation to achieve an information advantage.  If you would like to brainstorm these issues and discuss your specific business environment please contact us.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Senior Analyst

Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Read more at Future of Work

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

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***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.

Information Dominance as a Company's Mobile Strategy

In many industries today the competitive battleground is quickly shifting to the effective use of data to drive marketing, sales, customer support, R&D, and to deliver hyper-personalized user experiences and digital products.  These changes are most readily seen in companies that engage customers on the web and through mobile apps.  As more and more of customer interactions and engagements move to mobile apps and websites these changes will be all the more pronounced.  Just think about mobile banking, mobile commerce, mobile search, mobile media, mobile news/content and mobile travel apps.  These apps and the companies behind them are now offering incredible levels of near instant personalization based upon their knowledge of your preferences, location, shopping history, loyalty status, etc.  The more effective companies are at using their knowledge of you to personalize your experience, the more attractive, convenient, productive and sticky their apps become.  We at Cognizant call the effective use of data, "Code Halos" strategies.  Code Halos are the data that surround you, your activities and preferences.  It is the combination of personal and enterprise data used to provide the optimal experience.

Companies that will win in this competitive battlefield will understand that data collection, processing speed, analysis, situational awareness and the hyper-personalization of the users' experiences are the keys. They will recognize it is about speed.  It is a race to collect, analyze, and personalize.  The late US Air Force Colonel and great military strategist John Boyd coined the acronym OODA for observe, orient, decide and act.  He identified the fact that decision-making could be a competitive advantage.  If you can make good decisions faster than an opponent you have a powerful advantage.  Think about this in terms of a boxer in the ring, or a fighter pilot in the sky.  If you can understand the situation, make good decisions and act faster than your opponent you will likely win.  The same is true when the effective use of data is involved in user experiences and commerce.

Code Halo strategies is a way to think about and structure your information logistics in a manner that will give you information dominance.  Information dominance means you have an information logistics infrastructure in place for collecting data, analyzing and personalizing experiences better and faster than your competition.  This information, with the right IT infrastructure and architecture, can be used to instantly provide hyper-personalized experiences on the web and on mobile apps for customers, prospects, partners and employees.

Your information logistics systems must be fast enough to keep pace.  If your information logistics systems lag due to legacy systems that cannot support a "real-time" environment that is required for mobile apps and websites, then you have some hard choices to make that will impact your company's ability to succeed in this new world dominated by information.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Editor

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work 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

Recommended Strategy Book Code Halos

Recommended iPad App Code Halos for iPads

***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.

SMAC, Code Halos and the Good, Bad and Ugly of Tracking Data

As a SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) Analyst, I spend my days researching, writing and presenting ideas to companies and audiences.  One of the most important subjects these days is how to develop and implement the best possible information logistics systems.  That means utilizing and processing collected data in the most advantageous and efficient manner possible to further the ambitions of the business.  That goal is perfectly understandable for a business - collecting business data and transactional data is expected, but when it is your personal data (Code Halos) that is being collected we often feel differently.  For example, I love having my TripIt, Marriott and Delta mobile apps know about me, my preferences and my past, present and future travels, but I don't want that information shared with other vendors (or home burglars) without my permission.

In this article, my colleague Ben Pring, Co-Director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant is kind enough to address the good and bad of having your data (Code Halos) aggregated and tracked online.  I have included two embedded videos - first, a video interview that I filmed with Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring on the concepts of Code Halos, and a second far more professional clip on the role of Code Halos in our everyday life.

***

The response to our articles around Code Halo-thinking is overwhelmingly positive.   I and my co-authors, Malcolm Frank and Paul Roehrig, have spoken at dozens of client and industry events and engaged in numerous post-presentation discussions with a wide array of  senior IT and business leaders who when presented with  the Code Halo idea and follow us through our Crossroads Model tell us of  the opportunities Code Halo-thinking offers (including the risks of “extinction events”) are very real in their industry or market.  For  example, the narrative resonated with a major soft drink manufacturer that saw a new way to think about the social network around its soft drink; with an international airline which is beginning to socialize and internalize the new metaphor of a Code Halo to rethink how it moves customers from point A to point B; and with a leading financial services institution that admitted it was  only too aware of the “ionization” happening all around it as new ideas from start-ups begin to change the competitive dynamics the company faces.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/ctycYs18dyk

The second major reaction though – which may or may not surprise you, if you’ve read any of the previous pieces here, is that many people immediately internalize the Code Halo story and find “the dark side of the Halo.” Rather than focusing on the positive transformational commercial opportunities Code Halos  present, they land on the dystopian, Orwellian world of constant surveillance by Big (and little) Brother that Messer’s Assange, Manning and Snowden have brought to the fore in recent weeks, months and years.

Typically we hear a torrent of worst-case scenarios. “I don’t want to share my information with retailer x”, “I don’t want the government to have even more information on me that they do already”, “this is just going to make hackers’ lives easier”, “I get bombarded by enough advertising already; this is just going to make it even worse”, “I don’t want to live in 1984”, “I am not a number”, “how can I control who knows things about me”, “this is the final nail in the coffin of privacy”, “these ideas will never take off.”

The prism that people have is perfectly understandable.  Their concerns and fears are, of course, entirely valid and understandable. We share many of them. As digital immigrants ourselves we are at times as dazed and confused as any set of middle aged men by the emergent and volatile social mores of the new world and have to fight back the temptation to wallow in nostalgic revelries of how “this wasn’t the way we used to do it back in the day/old country.”

The grand experiment that we are all engaged in – creating a world of unprecedented hyper-connectivity of time, space, and culture - which the Code Halo phenomena is supercharging, is, by its very nature, unknowable and logically contains good things and bad.  Lots of good things are going to happen in a world of Code Halos, as are lots of bad things.

In short, we have no intention to deny that bad things will happen as a result of code meeting code. We fully expect they will. There is a very real dark side of the halo. All of the worst-case scenarios with which we are presented will happen, and are happening now.  People will get hacked. Government intrusion will grow. Advertisers will create new ways to embed advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives through every IP addressable form factor we use. Privacy will recede. The nefarious will have new opportunities to hurt us. Many innovations enabled by Code Halos will have unexpected consequences which will compound over time to produce unanticipated negative outcomes.  And yet we firmly believe these fears, concerns and objections are overblown, irrelevant or moot. Every objection is entirely the same objection that people raised as Al Gore’s Information Superhighway was entering the public consciousness in the middle of the 1990s; “I’ll never put my credit details onto the web,” Average Joe said in 1996; now Joe is routinely spending thousands of dollars online.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/XYwiDJ7UWHo

The Internet has been a crime scene in the last 20 years -- repeatedly. And it still is. And it always will be. But, today the Internet has 634 million websites and 2.4 billion users, according to uptime monitoring company, Royal Pingdom, and is here to stay. Nobody is going to un-invent it.

In 2013 so much of our lives are already online – shared, visible, transparent, open, all proffered voluntarily through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, et al, or less voluntarily via our credit score, phone records, movements, and key strokes that the government can impound without warrant -- that privacy is already an illusion, hackers already hack, advertisers can already advertise within our email, pharmacies already send our 16-year-old daughters coupons for diapers when neither they nor we knew they were pregnant; we are numbers, we are code.

The world that we are describing is already here. The Code Halo era is not imminent. It is now.

Just as the upside of the Internet has won over the downside we believe the upside of a Code Halo world will win over its downsides. The “give to get” ratio of the Code Halo world will be so positive that, in the same way that the cost and convenience of Internet era 1.0 triumphed over its doubters, the new Internet era of Code Halos will similarly see it detractor’s voices diminish and disappear.  

And one last thought; the ultimate value of Code Halos will originate out of the openness of data that is shared and this, of course, will mandate good behavior and accountability.  Just as lousy service that once went unpunished is now broadcast on social media with sometimes devastating impact, individuals or corporations that misuse or exploit information exchanged via Code Halos will struggle to enrich and inflate their Code Halo and to generate commercially material sparks. Bad Code Halo behavior will exist in a world of instant high visibility and will push some towards their extinction event. 

Thoughts?  

For more information on these concepts please visit www.unevenlydistributed.com.

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

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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.