Digital Ubiquity and the Art of Corporate Endurance

We have often heard information to be the new currency in this digital-first generation. When we dig deeper into the ever-rising tide of information, we still see a lot of analog currency transactions corroborating Gartner’s belief that most organizations lack the skills and knowledge to successfully execute a digital strategy. Infonomics, the emerging practice of monetizing and treating information as a corporate asset, would be the key to closing information value gaps by performance and vision.

By 2020, information will be used for reinventing 80% of business processes and products from a decade earlier.

Ray Kurzweil introduced the concept of the ‘Law of Accelerating Returns’ to depict the exponential rate of change of technology in his book “The Age of Spiritual Machines”. Gartner makes the prediction of 25 billion sensors by 2020, data doubling every two years and a 5X growth through 2017. Are we equipped to embrace such technology abundance? 

Industries must first understand their common vernacular of what ‘digital’ means for them: How to build new frontiers of value while embracing digital opportunities proactively amidst their biggest threats. Following the leader can be a dangerous game; a company with IT constraints isn’t in the same league as one that delivers cutting-edge customer experiences. A bi-modal adaptive approach establishes agility and personalization in customer-facing initiatives while evolving core systems to maintain stability and reliability. Luxottica follows this approach to extend the impact of bimodal maturity with a Facebook-like retailer site on the CRM platform.

Digitization is exerting unprecedented pressure on organizations to evolve as Standard & Poor’s data shows how the average corporate lifespan of leading companies is falling from 61 years in 1958 to just 18 years in 2011.

Industries are looking to reinvent themselves with the possibilities of new technologies to transform their business as everyone appears to be at the threat of disruption. A number of non-technology companies have also launched innovation labs to this end; hardware chains like Lowe’s Cos. and Home Depot Inc., retailers like Target Corp., Sears Holdings Corp., and real-estate giant Westfield Corp are some that have taken to emerging technology investments in the recent years. GE has shown what digital ubiquity can do to its business by extending digitization and connectivity to formerly analog transactions, processes or operations. This has revolutionized value creation and capture leading to outcome-based business models to transform customer engagement.

Corporate Endurance is about staying the course given that the evolution of IT Architecture and business models are moving in parallel to create a global interconnected platform. 

Adoption of Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, IoT is made accessible to one’s competitors and doesn’t by itself provide sustainable competitive advantage; differentiation lies in adopting smarter, original and quicker integration of such technologies.

There is a crying need for a multidimensional framework that captures the complexities of pervasive technology abundance in the interplay of people, business and objects.  A highly structured framework would enable strong engagement platforms with linear value chains giving rise to dynamic ecosystems of value to touch the lives of every stakeholder. 

About the Author:

Vishwas Anand is currently working as a Thought Leadership Lead at Aspire Systems, a mid-tier IT services provider and is credited with conceiving Aspire's Digital Transformation framework. He is an MBA student (2012-14) from IIM-Kozhikode and a published poet and writer, having written for the digital section of The Washington Times, Copperfield Review, Aquillrelle among other publications.