A new business machine
Digitalization is much more than WYSIWYG, scanned forms in an electronic document management solution or three click-thingy. Converting paper forms and paper driven processes is the greatest business efficiency opportunity in this age of things and machines yet the most oversimplified digital strategy and innovation is - a new business machine.
Without bias or commercial intent let's begin this digitalization discussion about the very first true digital innovation - the typewriter. Is there any irony that a company called international business machines would innovate a manual typewriting machine with an electric 'speedball' typing head enabling a typing speed in the 'hundreds of words per minute". With a variety of type styles 'balls' offered it would begin a revolutionize called the 'desktop' and put avalanche scale pressure on the traditional lithographic printing industry to change - allowing everyone to be a 'typist'. This company promised the 'speedball' machine would revolutionize the modern business office and it did.
Decades later another company named after a fruit launched an innovation that would transform the 'modern office' from green screen coaxial terminals connected to distantly remote mainframe computation monsters call 'mainframes' into personal computers named after a brand of apple. This new wave of 'micro-computing' business machine had beautiful typeset styles on television style 'monitors'. A new input device called a 'mouse' created the new world of personal computers - the sunrise of the My Computer generation. With the phrase “ a picture paints a thousand words’ this founder promised a brave new world giving us 'what-you-see-is-what-you get' - and the ‘what’ became data. Later this leader would promise newer business machines in the form of a tablet, a watch and a TV - he delivered.
Yesterday digital leaders, standing on virtual soap-boxes, are trying to catch up while bloggers are posting blog during sleeping hours and social media pundits screaming about next-generation computing at the edge of something. These next wave digital visionaries have just pushed a new system update to a connected workforce in a paper-less office, walking around heads-down afraid to miss a tweet with smart phones, tablets and watches alerting them to open 'apps' that goto to an ' internet of things' and once there everything they do is being learned by a different business machine in a cloud. Living a life d’service.
Today, this minute, the venti-uno millennium digitalization movement have rebuilt a new business machine with old parts – a high performance business machine powered by artificial intelligence and augmented reality, connected to a cloud, within an office-less space, spinning though an hour-less workday where they bring their own device to work so that they can buy from a company without products, they get a ride from a company without cars and they rent from a company that owns no rooms at all. That business machine just read this article.