Digital Transformation, "Business As Unusual"

By A. Abeku Haywood-Dadzie

Everything is changing every day. Things that we thought would last forever fade and slip away, and change continues to be the only constant in life. The world is changing each day, shrinking so fast that it’s becoming one big community with no borders or boundaries. Technological innovations are smashing physical and geographic barriers that once existed and separated nations, bringing people together like never before and making the world smaller and more accessible each day. These changes are invading every facet of our lives, challenging our beliefs and redefining our norms and values. It is breathing new life into almost everything and altering the face of everything we do. Today, governance systems can be run remotely, and the definition of institutions will not be limited to a physical location.

These innovations are increasing at a geometric progression and have become a key causal agent of amazement and disruption. Today is "business as unusual".The digital revolution is altering the way we live our lives, creating new markets, disrupting existing ones and displacing established market leaders. It is quickly transforming data into a major tool for real-time decision making.

The effect of this change is that organisations today are facing an unmatched pace of change. They face several challenges quite different in their systematic nature from those before. Organizations can no longer rely on campaigns that worked yesterday or even those that are working today. To survive in this ecosystem, they must learn to manage today. However, to succeed, they must learn to manage tomorrow today by consistently scanning their environment and positioning their team to solve tomorrow’s problems today.

These innovations, deadly as they are, are both "opportunity-threats". Generally, they lead to a highly saturated, homogeneous market with commoditized products and services. Almost all entities caught up in this web experience revenues increasing at a decreasing rate or sometimes breakeven profit. One thing technology advancement has done in the area of customer experience is that it has changed the rules of engagement and tipped the balance of power towards customers. Nowadays, it is easier than ever for customers to switch suppliers and service providers as they have more choice than ever. Added to this, it has become easier for suppliers and service providers to engage in backward and forward integration?so they can?eliminate other suppliers and vendors.

Rejecting today’s technological change can result in either a "fight or flight."?Is no more business as usual. The only option available to organisations facing these challenges is either to innovate by transforming or to die. Organizations operating in ecosystems where there is "digital disruption",?"digital revolution", "digital evolution", and "digital stagnation" must transform digitally by: improving customer experience and becoming customer-centric; ensuring operational efficiency and developing new revenue streams into the business; and evolving new business models and platforms.

Open Source, Application Programming Interface [API], Machine Learning [ML], Artificial Intelligence [AI], and Cloud services such as "Software as a Service [SaaS]", "Platform as a Service [PaaS]", and "Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS]" are rewriting management theories and removing market entry and exit barriers.Blockchain is set to revolutionise all industries in a way that will change all processes and create new models that will have a greater impact on consumers and markets.

Added to these, the use of cloud-native technologies such as DevOps, containers, microservices, and continuous integration and continuous delivery [CI/CD] by some of these digital native organizations, instead of the traditional monolithic, hard to maintain applications whose upgrades are massively slow, is making digital native organisations more agile when it comes to responding to their environment.

Today, the agility and the operational efficiency of these digital native organisations are railroading the profit levels of traditional organisations and forcing some of these originations into extinction. The capacity and ability of these originations which are more efficient operationally, and uses data analytics to improve, customize and personalize offers, to solve our immediate pressing needs are turning us all into digital nomads, "even if only in the connected way we traverse our local high street, or in which we move around and engage with digital media within our own homes".

Today's emerging physical reality of always-on, anytime, anyplace, and anyhow digital access increasingly looks certain to alter the ways in which many of us will interact with cyberspace, with organizations, and with each other. "

Currently, it is about divergence just as it was about convergence in the first digital revolution. The extrapolation of hardware into software and its divergence will lead to mass atomization. Added to this, the emergence of fibre broadband and the commercial deployment of 5G technology will provide the basis for the takeoff of the "Internet of things" [IoT] revolution, as smart cities all over the world are accelerating efforts in the race to become the best.

Unlike the first digital revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, which Nicholas Negroponte, the Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argued was occurring away from an "atom-based" economy and towards one focused around the creation, manipulation, communication, and storage of electronic binary digits, or "bits," The "Second Digital Revolution" involves the mass atomization of digital content, in addition to mass digitization. This means that, whereas a decade ago, the goal was to push things and people into the computer realm of cyberspace, far more effort is now being directed toward bringing digital content back into reality.In other words, the goal is no longer to create new worlds within computers, but rather to incorporate new computing and communication devices into the real world. The Second Digital Revolution subsequently reflects an age in which an increasing number of computing-enabled devices are permitting the everyday development of ubiquitous computing, with Internet-access and other digital technology almost constantly available. -[paraphrased from "The Second Digital Revolution]

The clear and present danger today is that connectivity is now recognised as a basic human right, and the ever-evolving demands of customers have now resulted in an expectation to be connected at all times! While customers want simplicity, personalization, and control, service providers need agility, reduced costs, and new revenue streams. There is no way out for anyone than to digitally transform, which, according to the TM Forum, "is the profound transformation of business and organisational activities, processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of a mix of digital technologies and their accelerating impact across society in a strategic and prioritised way, with present and future shifts in mind."

According to Telecom Magazine, the world we live in is becoming more and more connected as emerging technologies continue to demonstrate the capability to completely transform our societal norms in terms of the way we work, live, and interact with each other. Digital technology has been booming in recent years and is at the heart of a new era that is changing the traditional socio-economic models of business. There is a general agreement that the digital revolution is a tremendous opportunity for business growth. However, this transformation cannot take place without a profound change in organizations' structures, processes, and working methods. It requires judicious technological choices.

In conclusion, today it is imperative to point out that leaders cannot simply sanction a digital transformation; they must communicate a vision of what needs to be achieved and why. Leaders must be brave so as to take advantage of the new bold digital world out there.

Today it is imperative to point out that leaders cannot simply sanction a digital transformation; they must communicate a vision of what needs to be achieved, and why. Leaders must be brave so as take advantage of the new bold digital world out there.