So... What is Digital?

Once upon a time, mainframe computers roamed the Earth - free, happy and without natural predator. These mainframes were fed and watered by their keepers, the “Mainframe Engineer”, a protozoan ancestor of today’s modern Systems Administrator. Legend has it that during one fateful overtime session in the primordial data-centre soup, a mighty, slow moving meteorite called “Desktop Computing” struck the Earth, and when the Mainframe Engineers finally came to, they found their very reason for being… was gone.

it’s no surprise to find that the majority of those I speak to in the industry acknowledge the shift without truly understanding what it means to become Digital

As IT professionals - subject matter experts in our own little eco-cubes, it’s easy to lose touch with the slow (but quantum) shifts that have wont to occur in our industry. With corporations restructuring and re-branding their IT shops into “Digital” houses en masse, it’s no surprise to find that the majority of those I speak to in the industry acknowledge the shift without truly understanding what it means to become Digital.

A popular misconception is that Digital is as simple and as shallow as a relabelling of existing technologies and methodologies. Another, that Digital is the logical offspring of IT Consumerisation and Cloud Computing’s bonhomous union. Now, whilst there’s a modicum of truth to both of these assertions, they barely scratch the surface of the multi-faceted transformation that is occurring in just about every industry across the globe. Or at least those planning on being around in 5 years’ time.

So what does it actually mean to be Digital?

Digital is Big Data

We have exponentially more personal and behavioural information available to us than ever before. Through social media, search engines, online shopping, loyalty schemes, surveys, membership databases et al. we capture the how, when and why for just about every human interaction. The Digital challenge is two-fold – how to process this (largely unstructured) data as we approach the physical and logical limitations of traditional database technologies, and how do we then leverage our findings to drive commercial advantage, so we end up selling more and buying less.

Digital is Bi-Modal IT

Those who’ve worked in the industry a while will know that when it comes to IT, you play it safe. Super safe. Changes are implemented only after exhaustive testing, there are 3 big vendors you can trust with your infrastructure rollout (and of their products, only those in Rev 2 or above need be considered) and unless it has a 5 year lifecycle and 6-eon MTBF, don’t even entertain that consumer grade junk. Unfortunately, in this modern, fast-paced, customer driven world, speed to market is everything. Well, nearly everything. We still have a subset of Digital that needs to remain robust and highly available (databases and application infrastructure for example), but this traditional approach to IT now sits beside the second mode of IT – the “Agile”, get it out there fast, first methodology. The Agile approach encourages the adoption of bleeding edge thinking and technologies to form a “best-fit-for-now” model of infrastructure and service delivery. Rather than being risk-free, you can think of Agile as taking considered risks.

Digital is The Internet of Things

I have a rubber plant that isn’t online. And it’s feeling left out. Watches, phones, televisions, washing machines, electricity meters; these days, it seems that just about everything wants to connect back to the web. Welcome to the internet of things! And it’s not just a gimmick - beyond contributing to the great data pool in the sky, there are legitimate benefits to the modern, time-poor consumer in the offing.

the internet of things will be the catalyst for a new frontier of commerce and Digital is integral to it

Consider a scenario where you’re down to the last 100ml of milk. Your smart fridge senses the milk container is feeling a little on the light side and automatically shoots an order through to Coles Online to have a fresh carton delivered that afternoon. Meanwhile, your electricity company picks up that your consumption is a little on the high side compared to others in your demographic, and on closer analysis, determines that your smart fridge is one of the first generation, low-efficiency models. Your smart TV pops up an (authorised) offer for a brand new fridge which will pay itself off within 12 months of service. It’s as exciting as it is scary – but the internet of things will be the catalyst for a new frontier of commerce and Digital is integral to it.

Digital is a Service Oriented Approach

By its very nature, the Digital world is one which needs to scale up and out as rapidly as it contracts. Furthermore, in needing to remain abreast (and, indeed, ahead) of current industry and consumer trends, it doesn’t readily lend itself to the employ of a traditional BAU workforce. Vendor resources emerging from a combination of short and long term strategic engagements will make up the majority of the Digital workforce, both personnel and compute wise, in the not-too-distant future. This reveal is usually met with incredulous gasps and stunned silence when shared with my peers, but I encourage them to look at it as the opening of a new door rather than the death knell of their career. In a years’ time we will have challenging new internal positions which don’t exist in today’s traditional IT shop – service delivery and vendor managers, cloud orchestrators and business intelligence specialists just to name a few. And of course, our vendors will need to source their manpower from somewhere, so if we look upon this as a great opportunity to break out of the mundane and become a practitioner of the bleeding edge we can avoid becoming yet another Mainframe Engineer.

Digital is a Disruptive Blurring of Lines

What runs in the red, exists solely to support the “real” money makers in the organisation and is invariably the first target of any cost-cutting and/or blood-letting exercise? That’s right, it’s the IT department. But The Business (the nomenclature so often assigned to non-IT portions of an organisation) can no longer rely on traditional approaches to commerce if it seeks to prosper in the empowered, consumer driven world.

Digital doesn’t just support the business – it drives the business. In many instances, it is the business.

Technology, once an alternative platform to deliver age-old business practices, has pervaded every facet of a successful operation, from providing customer insights, to targeting and facilitating sales, to beating competitors to market. In the new-age, Digital doesn’t just support the business – it drives the business. In many instances, it is the business.

Digital is a Perfect Storm of Evolution

I want to make it patently clear that Digital is not, in and of itself, a revolution. We’ve been capturing, buying and selling customer data, running agile projects, producing internet-aware “things”, commoditising our service offerings and elevating infrastructure into the cloud for years, whilst computers have been a ubiquitous presence throughout the business since the mid-90s. No, what makes now special is that all of these offerings have matured, almost simultaneously, to the point where we can adopt them as an approved and normalised operating paradigm to realise financial benefit to the entire organisation. One can consider Digital a meteoric amalgam of many smaller, developing, technological meteors. And it’s going to hit big - so you best be ready for it.