I started writing the "Way of DAU" because of my experience with a few CxO individuals. The problem was that they saw Digital Adoption of Big Data and IoT technologies as a sort of business elixir which would magically provide them with new insight and enable them to change their business models.
Increasingly these individuals became more impatient as they expeced IT to magically "deliver the goods" and transform their businesses. They talked far and wide at business forums and in the press of how transformational digital technologies are and they decided to develop big enompassing digital strategies. The trouble was, they never actually articulated where the value lay or what the actual value proposition was. So it was difficult to understand from a technological perspective, where to start with credible opportunities and business cases which might succeed. Trying to separate genuine opportunity (which justified the investment) from fluff was impossible.
Two years later they were still waiting to implement anything tangible and still talking, whilst other companies were starting to pass them by. Little wonder then that Thomas Davenport and George Westerman published an article in HBR on why Digital Strategies Fail. Basically, companies like GE have gone full tilt at implementing digital business models and capabilities without stopping to identify and prioritise value, and expecting to get everything right first time.
Unfortunately this is the problem with innovation. It's difficult to get things right at the first attempt. Just look at Dyson, it took him thousands of experiements and years of development to crack the physics behind the bagless vaccum cleaner and he had the advantage of knowing what problem he wanted to crack. When trying to introduce ground breaking new digital products, there's a lot needed to understand what the real problem is before you try to optimise the solution. Then, as a former CEO of Intel said, you may still need to pivot in the market place to find where the real sweet spot is and fulfill the dreem of market disruption.
George Westerman has even gone so far as to say in a new article in the MIT Sloan Business Review that your business does not need a Digital Strategy, it just needs a business strategy which takes cognisance of Digital Opportunities. He talks about Building Leadership Capability, Not Abandoning Digital Transformation to IT, Avoiding Siloed Thinking and Not Pushing the Envelope too Far.
These are some good common sense starting points and pre-requisities for focused action. Let's hope that the C-suite start to listen.
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