Kevin Benedict is a TCS futurist and lecturer focused on the signals and foresight that emerge as society, geopolitics, economies, science, technology, environment, and philosophy converge.
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 Keeping an outdated IT system or business process for the purpose of achieving a positive return on the original investment is a strategy based on pride, not logic.
I had the honor of interviewing and disrupting the vacation of Hitachi's CTO for Industrial IoT, Rob Tiffany today. In this interview we talk all about IoT platforms, big data analytics, architectures, digital twins and solution stacks for industrial IoT. I learned a lot and hope you will too.
***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.
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.
***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.
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.
***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.
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.
***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.
