Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

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

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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.

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

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Digital Transformation in Retail - 13 Action Steps

The behaviors and expectations of today’s consumers are rapidly evolving under the influence of digital and mobile technologies; as a result, retail growth and profits are quickly shifting to digital commerce. These changes require retail industry decision makers to acquire real-time situational awareness, new digital strategies and a digital mindset around business transformation. Retailers must recognize and act proactively when customers, competitors and markets change by deploying the appropriate digital strategies and technologies in the right sequence to maximize returns and competitive advantage.

We encourage retail executives to understand and follow these 13 actions:

Recognize the need for digital transformation extends beyond websites and mobile apps to the entire organization and across all business processes.
Understand the degree of change occurring in retail as a result of customers’ fast-changing behaviors.
Judge accurately where your organization stands on a digital technologies maturity curve.
Show the necessary leadership to change strategies, budget priorities and plans based on new data, trends and insights, and then make the required investments in digital technologies, people and skills to compete successfully.
See that traditional channel-centric strategies are no longer viable; rather, retailers must adopt precise, customer-centric strategies, enabled by digital technologies.
Don’t excuse slow adoption of digital technologies, as the data is clear and compelling and demands immediate action.
Think with a digital mindset, intimately understand the capabilities of digital technologies, understand digital’s role and importance in customer interactions, and develop new digital business models, processes and strategies for supporting today’s and tomorrow’s digital markets and consumers.
Realize that digital transformation and the industry’s adoption of digital technologies are occurring on an accelerated schedule that peaks around 2020. It waits for no retailer’s budget cycles, three-year master plan, leadership change or strategy.
Align the pace of digital transformation initiatives with the speed at which consumers are adopting digital technologies, behaviors, markets and thinking. This might mean over-investment in the near term to catch up or stay ahead of the competition.
Unify disparate digital transformation initiatives behind a single company-wide digital transformation doctrine – a guiding statement that effectively describes the reason for digital transformation, what needs to happen and what winning looks like. This doctrine must be used to direct and shape the entire company’s efforts.
Closely monitor the business impact of rapidly emerging digital technologies to ensure investments are prioritized and acted upon in the right time and place to maximize ROI and competitive advantage, while also balancing the need to innovate and embrace a fail-fast, test and learn mentality.
Understand how digital transformation will alter traditional retail roles, responsibilities and skills for all associates.
Pay close attention to how digital transformation shapes and changes consumers’ interactions and experiences, and train associates to best serve digitally enabled consumers.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Change is the only constant in life.” In business, another constant exists: While some companies will adapt to market changes, others won’t. The pace of change across the industry landscape is accelerating like never before. Some retailers will choose to deny, ignore and retrench, while others will embrace, adopt and lead. The race to digital transformation is on, and there is no time for delay.

You can download the full report, "How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards" here.

Watch the 3-minute video on digital thinking in retail.

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

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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Mistakes Retailers Make in Digital Transformation

A key challenge that retailers face today is the difficulty of accurately judging where they are on the digital maturity curve relative to their competitors. There appears to be little expertise in making this assessment; for example, 79% of digital leaders don’t know they are ranked as leaders, and only 56% of retailers ranked as average in our study believe they are at this level. The other 44% in the average category mistakenly believe they are either leaders or laggards. The lack of competitive clarity makes it even more difficult to develop an effective competitive strategy.

Our research suggests that retailers’ plans reflect neither self-awareness nor a realistic idea of what it will take to catch up or leapfrog their competitors in this highly competitive space. Namely, factors such as online sales penetration, business performance, attitudes about digital, planned technology investments and efforts to close skill gaps do not align with the progress retailers expect they’ll make vs. their competitors over the next three years.

As part of this research exercise, we also asked 125 retail managers about the biggest mistakes they saw related to the digital transformation. Their top five answers were as follows:

Failing to stay fully on top of changing customers’ needs and behaviors.
Focusing insufficiently on cybersecurity.
Ignoring fresh thinking from outside the company.
Lacking a clear digital strategy.
Moving too slowly.

All five of these top answers are indeed critical to success. Retail executives would be well served to take these opinions from retail managers to heart.

Successful digital transformation initiatives require executives to have a vision for and understanding of what they are trying to achieve. As number 4 above identifies - retail managers believe an unclear digital strategy is among the biggest mistakes companies make when embarking on a digital transformation strategy. Digital strategies flow from and are the result of an effective digital transformation master “doctrine.” The purpose of a digital transformation doctrine is first to create a unified understanding of why digital transformation is needed and, second, to guide all tactical digital strategies that evolve from it. An organization’s digital doctrine should influence its strategy, its operating model and the tactics it employs to compete.

You can download the full report, "How Digital Thinking Separates Retail Leaders from Laggards" here.

Watch the 3-minute video on digital thinking in retail.

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

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

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

Winning Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

For executives, transforming an enterprise is always difficult, but when an enterprise is highly profitable - digital transformation is even harder. The temptation to follow the maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” is just too compelling. "When you average 8% same-store sales [growth] for 35 years, it can breed a sense of, 'Why do we need to change? Things are working,'" John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. Today, however, Whole Foods is struggling to compete with other lower priced grocery stores that have embraced organics and healthier foods. If you take your eye off the game for a second, consumers will change directions on you.

The challenge enterprises are faced with today is that digital technologies are changing the way consumers behave faster and in different ways than executives have ever seen before. Today’s profits can hide or mask the serious problems of tomorrow.

Competitors can’t compete, and leaders can’t lead if they don’t know the rules of the game. Understanding how the game is played, and how points are scored, are key to any competition. In the age of digital transformation these are some of the key rules to learn in order to score:

Data is the modern commercial playing field, information dominance is your goal, those that can “act and with speed” have the advantage over those which cannot.
Advantages in the speed of data-driven decision-making, automation, robotic process automation will dictate the winners of tomorrow.
Complexity is the enemy of agility, and acts as poison from the past.
It takes an optimized Information Logistics Systems (OILS) to support real-time digital interactions.
Faster operational tempos and information logistics systems – open up a plethora of new business opportunities and business models.
Precision and real-time data beats estimates and conjecture.
Digital interactions require real-time business operational tempos.
Bad data will make the smartest systems dumb.
Competitive advantages from new technologies depreciate quickly – so act fast.
Situational awareness enables management to focus on the knowns, rather than the unknowns.
Demand for real-time digital customer interactions increases the need for contextually relevant and personalized user experiences and digital transformation across all systems and processes.
Data has a shelf life, and the economic value of data diminishes quickly over time, and the more data that is collected analyzed and used, the greater the economic value it produces in aggregate. In addition, the economic value of data multiplies when combined with context and right time delivery.
Digits can be changed faster than the human mindset.

These rules not only help you understand how to compete and win, but they should also guide enterprises in their development of a digital transformation doctrine – a guiding and unifying statement as to the purpose, desired effect and outcome that is wanted.

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Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

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

Digital Transformation from 40,000 Feet

Winning in Chaos - Digital Enterprise Strategies

Digital Transformation in Retail - 13 Action Steps

Mistakes Retailers Make in Digital Transformation

Winning Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

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