Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

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:

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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

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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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".

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.

Digital Transformation from 40,000 Feet

The size of competitors and the longevity of their brands, are less predictive of future success than the quality and speed of their information logistics systems, and their ability to use it as a competitive advantage.

More data is being generated today than ever before, and successful companies are investing in business analytics and big data solutions to mine competitive advantages. There is a new sense of urgency today as businesses realize 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.

Mobile consumers are impatient and demand instant results. IT infrastructures must be able to support real-time mobile and IoT (internet of things) interactions, and this requirement will increase as mobile commerce is predicted to grow to 47% of all e-commerce by 2018. Supporting real-time information requires not only real-time IT environments, but also digital transformation across the entire organization. In order to succeed, businesses must react to location-based and time-sensitive information while it is still contextually relevant.

Data is the lifeblood of e-commerce, mobile commerce and increasingly in physical stores where the digital and physical worlds are rapidly converging. As commerce rapidly shifts online and mobile, the success of products, brands and companies are increasingly dependent on data and systems that consume it in order to support the demand for more personalized digital experiences (Read Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me). How an organization makes sense of data, protects it, and disseminates it is a complex and challenging issue.

Data strategies and the execution of them will determine the market winners of the future, and the future is now. Businesses are learning from Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix and others that effective data and analytics strategies are the secret to success in digital markets (Read How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards). Information dominance is now the strategic business goal.

In the book Code Halos, authors Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Benjamin Pring, describe how the revolution today in data and analytic strategies are impacting industry structures in “consistent and violent patterns.” In another recent study, 82 percent of investors and equity analysts believe industries are being disrupted by innovations in data and analytics. They believe these innovations will alter competitive dynamics.

In addition to investments in IT, achieving real-time operational tempos in an enterprise takes rethinking business models, organizational structures and business processes. It requires new ways of operating and employee training. Supporting real-time operational tempos is a daunting task many will fail to prioritize, and will suffer as a consequence.

The winners of a digital tomorrow will invest in four key areas:

Optimizing their information logistics systems
Supporting real-time operational tempos
Increasing business agility
Using contextually relevant data to personalize digital user experiences

The purpose of these investments is to capture the value of data, exploit the meaning, and attract more customers and loyalty through the speed of their enterprise operations. Speeds should be maximized in the following 5 areas:

IT system speeds
Business process speeds
Decision-making speeds
Digital and Business Transformation speeds
Aligning with changing customer behavior speeds

Optimized information logistics systems that support real-time speeds will take advantage of sensors, online interactions and mobile devices to collect data. Sensors can take multiple forms. They can be embedded chip technology that monitors physical and chemical environments and wirelessly transmits digital results, or they can be software code that monitors contextually relevant opportunities, moments and environments (CROME) by reading data inputs collected from all digital sources. CROME triggers are “meaningful bits of data that when captured and analyzed can activate time-sensitive and relevant personalization that can be used to enhance user experiences.”

CROME triggers integrated with real-time artificial intelligence algorithms can transform the potential value of data, into kinetic value by instantaneously personalizing a user’s experience and making it contextually relevant.

Businesses that embrace digital transformation will optimize their organizational structures and business models to support the operational tempos required by a mobile and connected world. By tempos we mean the pace or speed at which the organization must operate to compete successfully. Increasingly mobile and connected device users demand real-time responses. To support real-time responses requires an enterprise to move beyond “human time” and into the realm of “digital time” (Read 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation). Humans as biological entities operate at a pace governed by the sun, moon, and the physical requirements to keep our carbon-based bodies alive. These requirements and mental limitations make scaling humans beyond these time-cycles impossible without augmentation. Augmentation takes the form of intelligent process automation, artificial intelligence and algorithms. These types of augmentation technologies have the advantage of being able to work 24x7x365, and don’t as yet ask for holidays off.

Once an organization is capable of supporting real-time tempos, and can support the personalized interactions mobile users demand, the challenge becomes business agility.

Agility is the speed at which a business can recognize, analyze, react and profit from rapidly changing consumer demands in a hyper-competitive market. Businesses that can accurately understand customer demand and their competition, and then respond faster, will soon dominate those, which are slower. The military strategist John Boyd called these competitive advantages, “getting inside of your competitor’s decision and response curves.” This means your actions and responses are occurring at a pace that surpasses your competitions’ ability to comprehend it.

Businesses must recognize the demand for real-time operational tempos is only going to increase and this requires strategy, action and a budget. The principle of acceleration and mobility states, “As the number of connected devices increase, the demand for digita interactions will exponentially increase, resulting in an even greater need for digital transformation involving business operations, business processes and IT environments.” Delaying a response, or denying the need for these requirements are not winning options.

Sub-optimal information logistics systems, and the glacial operational tempos of yesteryear will not succeed in today’s or tomorrow’s world, and company valuations have already begun to reflect this. One-third of investors and equity analysts surveyed believe that good data and analytics strategies are rewarding companies with higher valuations. Gartner’s Douglas Laney has even coined the phrase infonomics to describe how information, as a new asset class, can be measured to estimate its impact on company valuations.

To succeed in the digital future, CIOs must implement innovative data strategies and information logistics systems capable of winning in a real-time world where contextually relevant, instant and personalized experiences are required. A good new book on the subject of preparing for this new reality is "What to Do When Machines Do Everything." They must develop company cultures where change is viewed as an opportunity. They must digitally transform their businesses to operate at real-time tempos and move beyond “human-time” limitations to algorithm supported “digital-time.” They must understand that rapidly changing digital consumer behaviors mandate companies operate in a more agile manner capable of rapid responses to new opportunities and competitive threats.

I invite you to watch my latest short video on digital technology trends and strategies:

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

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube 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.

Winning in Chaos - Digital Enterprise Strategies

Digital technology innovations and advancements, and our adoption of them, have changed us. We are different consumers, employers and employees. Our expectations have increased. We have become mobile, impatient and demanding. We are global. We demand immediate, accurate and real-time responses. We use our technology not just for reading historic events and news, but also for predicting our future turn while navigating at 60 MPH.

Today we want personalized and contextually relevant experiences. We want digital experiences that are beautiful, simple and elegant. We want instant access to all products, services, news, information and friends’ status. We want to share our lives instantly and globally. We want to find things, buy things, move money and complete transactions from anywhere at anytime. We want to work from anywhere and have all the information we need instantly.

Much of the world today is experiencing a digital evolution. We know when and how to reach for our second brain (smartphones) and access the information needed to both survive and thrive in the digital age. A phrase now associated with the last decade is “there’s an app for that,” but now it is Alexa, Siri or Google knows.

Last year while in Rwanda, I visited refugee camps that were operating on mobile phones. The UN, rather than delivering hundreds of truck loads of food to refugee camps every week, were experimenting with providing mobile phones to families, sending mobile payments to them, and letting them go out into the local markets to buy food, thus benefiting the local economies. Even the most challenged populations are being transformed by mobile and digital technologies.

All of these innovations and our resulting behavioral adaptions – change us, our marketplaces, industries and even economies and bring us to this tipping point - the point at which a series of small innovations or actions becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more drastic change. That drastic change today is referred to by the World Economic Forum as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Hell Creek Formation is a famous geological area in the USA spanning North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. It is filled with the bones of dinosaurs that were unable to adapt to the changes in their environment. John Boyd, a renowned military strategist, taught that life is a process of adaption, and that winners will find ways to exploit change and to adapt to it in order to win. The dinosaurs were unable to adapt, and their fossilized bones are a testament. Boyd taught that adapting and winning requires three things, 1) People, 2) Ideas, and 3) Things - in that order. To win we must be trained to think and do the right things, use the right ideas (doctrines, strategies and tactics) and then utilize the best things available (technologies, equipment, materials, design, etc.) to adapt to and exploit the changes around us.

We humans seem to prefer solving problems, and overcoming obstacles as a way to create stable, secure and predictable environments. We like to fix problems/challenges and be done with them. That desire, however does not fit with today’s reality of perpetual change. In a world of perpetual change we are bound to operate in an ambiguous environment that requires a new mindset and strategy that finds ways of winning through change. Change is not to be solved. Change is the energy that propels organizations into action, into new innovations, new business models, and new opportunities. Rarely will you find opportunities of significance where change is not required or found.

In a recent interview of 17 high tech executives, the top motivation they gave for companies engaging in digital transformation were “changing customer behaviors”. New customer behaviors introduce higher levels of ambiguity as a result of change. This change is taking place at the same time as we are exponentially increasing the amount of data we are collecting. The challenge today then is to find ways to win in the data, and in ambiguity.

As the tempo of change increases and we move beyond "human time” into “digital time” (the speed at which computers can operate) we must adopt new strategies for succeeding in ambiguity. We propose that the economic winners of tomorrow will be organizations that define processes that let them operate with agility in a fluid, ever-changing environment - always collecting and analyzing new data and perpetually adjusting to new realities utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning. They will not, as a goal, seek stability; rather they will employ strategies for succeeding inside instability. They will understand the biggest opportunities for success in the future will lie not outside, but inside of ambiguity.

I invite you to watch my latest short video on digital technology trends and strategies:

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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 Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Combinatorial Nature of Digital Technologies and Legos

Digital Transformation Crunch Time

Announcement: Sequencing Digital Technology Implementations Over the Next 40 Months

Digital Transformation from 40,000 Feet

Winning in Chaos - Digital Enterprise Strategies

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

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