Digital As Usual Themes

Looking into the current marketplace, there are three dominant trends in current digital exploitation:

• Exploiting Cloud Platforms

• Business Agility

• Value Based Management

Most commentators focus on either cost or scalability issues when discussing cloud platform exploitation, citing this as an uninspired approach to mechanisation of what is already there, which has been described as making caterpillars faster (as opposed to transforming them into butterflies). However, cloud platforms and SaaS applications are great for businesses wanting to standardise and simplify their businesses, either as a basis for performance improvement and automation or as a means of making integration of acquisitions (under M&A) easier. The latter often being a tool used to bring new products and know how into a business for further innovation.

Business agility is an evolutionary extension of not just Agile Development and Design thinking, but a full blooded extension of Lean approaches across Integrated Product Teams and DevOps styles of delivery to continuously experiment with opportunities and deliver new value at pace. If a business is not a start up and has not simplified its processes and applications, this can be difficult to achieve. In the end, though it is all about focusing on customer value.

Value based management has two strands of thinking; firstly it connects the dots between market insight, customer experience and business agility to focus on value; secondly it recognises that a digital business will spend proportionally more on digital and information technology than a traditional one, so it needs to understand how and why it spends the money (and other valuable resources) and then to make sure that it balances spend appropriately between maintenance, protection, enhancement and revenue or value streams, as well as innovation.

At The Edge of The Enterprise and the New Lean

One of the Truisms for anyone practising IT Strategy and Architecture, is that All the Competitive Opportunities Arise at the Edge of the Enterprise. Everything else is about making business more fit to exploit them through improving the agility, effectiveness, efficiency and protection of  business capabilities.

This is why Digital has been so important. Digital blurs the edge of the enterprise so that a business may operate globally to reach more customers or provide a more comprehensive service to existing customers. Digital also make it easier to partner with other organisation to deliver new products and services or a better sales and delivery experience. 

Digital also makes it easier to reach out and find out what is going on in the market place and find out what is going on and to affect delivery of service in customers homes, premises and assets through combinations of IoT and Big Data.

However, as companies all adopt digital models and Digital becomes the new normal other things are starting to happen. Customer expectations have risen and improving the "Customer Journey" or the life cycle of customer experience has now become essential. This is now encouraging greater examination of internal processes and capabilities.

Whereas before, internal capabilities were improved for scalability, predictability and efficiency. Now, internal capability has to be optimised to address everything that is essential for delivering service to customers. Digital has become part of the New Lean Organisation. Not only does this change the nature of investment, it requires continuous discipline, development of Enterprise Architecture capability, partnering with Product Managers (especially in Marketing) and investment in flexible productivity technologies such as BPM and Machine Learning to reduce lead times for customer fulfilment, improve consistency and enable employees to spend their time doing meaningful work (as opposed to the drudgery of many repetitive clerical tasks).

This will not only make employees more productive, but it should enable organisations to deliver a wider range of products and services, tailored more specifically to individual customer needs and with enhanced economies. For some people this means more fulfilling jobs. For others this represents a threat to low skill jobs. The biggest challenge now is going to be the (re)training of low skill employees.