Just one more post about the importance of quickness and agility and I’ll leave this tired trope by itself. It had taken over 50 years for a reasonable most US households to acquire landline telephone service. It required less than 10 years for most households to acquire mobile phone services and less than a handful of years for a majority of households to access and use Facebook.
The initial ventures were huge – putting wires up all over America, especially when many people resided in rural areas still, and the costs and advantages of a home phone were tenuous. As people became convinced that home phones were valuable, cell phones emerged and again the cost/benefit was relatively uncertain when anyone could drop a quarter into a neighborhood pay phone. When the mobile phones started offering other features and immediate convenience became paramount, cell phones accelerated. Facebook and other platforms are built on the previous two ideas – ubiquitous connectivity through a worldwide backbone and frequently wireless connectivity predicated on smart phones.
- Site Contractors
- “Regards,” [personal, alright for second-time contact emails]
- Chambers of Business and Industries
- “Make safety a reality and don’t be considered a fatality.”
- 766 satisfied customers
- Be a Transformational innovator than a micro-manager
Building on these or other platforms, one can get to the market much more and effectively for digital products quickly. Mutually reinforcing or at conflict? The supporters and especially the vendors who are backing “digital transformation” want one to believe that you could work at speed only through digital transformation, and for the most part they may be right.
But what they aren’t telling you will there be is no last destination for digital transformation. It isn’t a place on the map, but a journey that once began reaches a destination. Once you create fully digital business processes you will have to collect and manage the data and acquire insight from the data to put back into your business.
Analyzing and understanding the info generated is simply as important (or even more so) than simply automating and digitizing the processes. Yet examining and understanding this is of the info is more challenging and more time eating. So excellent digital insights and processes Can provide more speed to insight, speed to product and speed to market. But only if your processes and systems are tuned to digital work, and only if the info can be managed by you produced. But as only close observer of the IT revolution knows, on the treadmill once, you can’t ever log off and it only goes faster. Plus, there is a “dark side” to technology and the IT that supports it.
Any architecture that makes you efficient, in a position to process more data or make more decisions, often also makes your processes and decision making more organized and more rigid. ERP has proven this time around and again, helping organizations work more effectively but often locking them into older operating models and processes.
Will digital transformation be an accelerator or an inhibitor? The acceptable answer to the question above is: yes. Initially, digital transformation will speed up business operations. Of course many companies are just beginning this journey, and are learning how to make sense of the info they obtain and create new insights.