Hyper Digital Future: A New Playbook

It is not a stretch to say that the world is a different place now from just a year ago. The surprising thing is that even saying it sounds so commonplace – something almost no one is going to challenge. The lasting changes in our behavior, the depth of the disruption & the steepness of the recovery, the global extent of the impact, have permeated every aspect of our lives.

Health, behavior, societal norms, financial & business models – no one and nothing has remained untouched from the pervasive tentacles of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nothing is the same as before, with short & long-term changes fundamentally impacting behaviors & patterns for individuals, customers, & businesses.

This is what Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said way back in Apr 2020, an era ago “As Covid-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we have seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months.” And the pace has only accelerated since then! It is as if the pandemic created a wormhole in our space-time continuum, making the distant Hyper Digital Future a present reality for us, way ahead of its time.

What does Hyper Digital Future even mean? And how does one get used to it, even thrive in it?

To understand it better, I have come up with a scaffolding of terms & explanations to support the unbearable lightness of being digital!

1.     Let us start with what does it mean when we say something is now ‘Digital’?

o  At its simplest, it is the act of converting something that is atoms & molecules in the physical world into ethereal bits & bytes in the internet world. A paper letter becomes an email, a DVD can now be streamed, a paper currency payment can now be done by clicking a few numbers on your mobile, a hardbound can now be read on an e-reader, a doctor visit can be done via telepresence, a flight can be boarded using…well scratch that last one, since so many of us have forgotten what that activity feels like!

2.     What enables converting something to Digital?

o  These are what we will term as Digital Technologies: emerging technologies that help with digitizing processes, automating activities & workflows, capturing & making sense of the huge amounts of data these bits & bytes are generating, delivering software and services from remote & virtual locations, augmenting human senses & touchpoints with interfaces & intelligence derived from machines, some smarter than even Elon Musk.

o  Cloud, Big Data, IoT, Automation, AI/ML, AR/VR, 5G…this list is quite familiar now to even cursory followers of technology, and even better understood by those known as Digital Natives.

3.     Wait, who are Digital Natives?

o  These are people unlike you and me (not expecting these D-natives to be reading this article ??) who were born and have grown up in the Digital world. They don’t know how to drive without a GPS, what an audio cassette is, don’t understand how the world could have functioned without internet, …but already inhabit a Digital Future, through hyper presence on the now ubiquitous Digital Platforms.

4.     What are Digital Platforms?

o  Digital Platforms are challenging traditional boundaries of buyers/sellers, users/creators, marketplaces/production factories, physical/virtual, disrupting almost all industries and upending business models.

o  We are familiar with the ubiquitous ones like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Amazon, Square etc, but look around and you will find platforms in industries & domains that transcend typical B2C activities into B2B and other parts of the economy: procurement, claims, drug discovery, home buying. The list is really long….

o  Platforms allow for the non-linear growth & digitization that enables increase in productivity, reduces inefficiencies, and moves the economy to a more asset-light set of entities. The Platform Revolution (also the name of a very popular and instructive book on this topic by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudhary,) is affecting every industry and part of our global economy, and Digital Platforms are become more of the norms in several industries as market leaders, accelerating Digital Transformation.

5.     What is Digital Transformation?

o  Leveraging platforms and digital technologies to digitize different parts of the business and value chains, modernizing archaic and legacy systems, integrating the various disparate systems, data, workflows into a seamless whole, moving operations & processes to the cloud, creating and unlocking value along the way in terms of speed, real-time, experience, service, smarter decisions – that is at the heart of Digital Transformation

o  There are different shades of Digital Transformation around us, colored & shaped differently due to Covid-19 crisis and the pandemic after-effects :

§ Entrenched – digital transformation that was already in play, like contactless payments in Retail, streaming media consumption, eCommerce, have now become fully entrenched. Almost every major retailer has announced record-breaking online sales growth, and organizations that couldn’t adapt quickly have filed for bankruptcy (JC Penney, Neiman Marcus, Hertz….this list from 2020 alone is quite long)

§ Accelerated – some of the transformation has been accelerated beyond imagination: think ab Zoom usage, Work from Home adoption in general, virtual classrooms, food takeout/delivery services, due to constraints and regulations imposed on people & societies around the world during Covid time. People are finding out that they can still be productive & effective, organizations can still function & delivery, and be able to juggle work/life balance better.

§ Reinforced – Some of the digital transformation is working to reinforce human-centric behavior and values. Families & friends still want to meet, teams want to celebrate achievements together, gym rats still want to exercise with others. New companies and models have sprung up to cater to this: whether it is Peloton, wider adoption of collaboration software like MS Teams or Slack, social media usage of different kinds (TikTok, Clubhouse…being some of the latest ones): the need for connection spans physical & digital worlds.

§ Intensified – And finally, some universal truths in life, whether business or personal, have seen intense focus and transformation. Being lean & agile to ride out the storm, conserving cash and managing cashflow to stay solvent, modernizing investments & infrastructure to move past the recession and take advantage of the V-shaped recovery. Especially for businesses, accelerating digital transformation initiatives that would have taken years and compressing them into a few months, and impacting their entire value chain, not just the front-end or customer experience part, has become an urgent case for survival, not just a business case decision.

6.     What about those aspects that still remain Physical?

o  Aha…now we get to the interesting part. How much can be digitized? And what should be digitized?

o  The human-machine interface remains at the frontier of the digital transformation. Physical objects and activities are at the core of human existence, and technology is now evolving to understand human needs, augment huma capabilities, even interface with emotions.

o  There is even a term for those endeavors that require both a physical and digital presence: Phygital, a combination of physical & digital. You can use an e-boarding pass, but you still need to be there to do the travel (there I go again…not happening for a while!). eCommerce may be booming, but goods still need physical transportation and delivery. Cars can drive themselves using digital technologies, but you still need to be physically in it to get somewhere!

o  How much physical space we accede to the digital world will ultimately depend on our trust in the digital technologies, and the ethics & policy framework that grows around new- fangled ones like AI, facial recognition, AR/VR, blockchain, IoTs, drones and so on.

o  In the Hyper Digital Future, as Buzz Lightyear said it in Toy Story, it will be taking that ‘To Infinity and Beyond!’

7.     So, what and when is the Hyper Digital Future? Are we there yet?

o  Hyper Digital Future is when most of what we currently do & experience physically can be replicated into bits & bytes and doesn’t feel any different. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Digital is a load we will all carry to different extents.

o  An extreme example is like you are in a multiverse with your Oculus headset and can touch/feel/smell the destination and your social contacts, as if in real life. That does seem like in A Galaxy Far Far Away…for now!

o  But some of that is happening as we speak. Digital Leapfrogging….Digital Transformation at the enterprise level and at warp speed, is buzzing us and our organizations into the Hyper Digital Future, leveraging Cloud, Automation, AI/ML, and other digital technologies.

o  Every aspect of every industry is getting digitized. Moving from B2C to B2B, front-end to back-end, technology to operations & processes, automated to intelligent to sentient, it is sweeping away vestiges of legacy and technical debt.

o  And the result is becoming Touchless, Immersive, Seamless, Real-time, Error-free…compounding the effect of digital technologies on one another.

Some industries are clearly at the forefront although every industry is getting transformed due to platforms and digitization. It is only specific companies that are lagging, getting disrupted, left behind in the digital trail. A recent IBM report though indicates that most companies are still ill-prepared for this level of digital transformation. A survey making the rounds puts it succinctly: when asked who is leading Digital Transformation in their organizations, and asked to choose between different CxOs, including CEO, most answered Covid-19 as the main driver ??

Technology has become not just a part of our present culture, but culture itself. And Digital is the predominant meme in this culture. As an organization, as a business, as leaders and consumers, and as individuals, you want to adopt the New Playbook, so you are not still trying to figure out what this meme is all about (I still have trouble understanding the memes being shared by the digital natives, which includes my sons!! You have to rethink & reimagine, and take the first physical step to enter the brave new digital world!

Joine me @raknz and @Hexawareglobal while we discuss this and related topics during our tweetchat at Nasscom's NTLF #Nasscom_NTLF #HexawareatNTLF on Feb 11th at 12:30 pm IST