Asia's Digital Dragons

Asia's Digital Appetite

According to experts in McKinsey, Asia is grabbing the opportunities available from digital to try and leapfrog traditional economic leaders in the west and compensate for historic lack of investment in infrastructure. They single out India, Indonesia and China as the countries with the most energetic approaches and the most innovation. They cite greater appetite for social media take up and openess to mobile and other new technologies as drivers to greater innovation.

This position is supported by Gartner's identification of Asia's 10 leading digital disruptors:

• Tencent
• AliBaba
• Baidu
• Ant Financial
• JD.com
• DiDi
• Xiaomi
• Yahoo Japan
• Naver
• Lufax

The interesting fact about this list is that it is dominated by Consumer oriented businesses. B2B opportunities are yet to be exploited. Even so, the power house that is AliBaba is reputed to dwarf western giants such as Amazon. So Asia is currently playing to its numbers and culture to establish scale.

Garnter recommends that western enterprises operating in Asia should consider adopting local platforms to guarantee penetration and better customer experience in Asian Markets.

Future Digital Directions in Asia

A recent survey of global CIOs by Logicalis showed that CIOs in the Asia Pacific area have been disappointed by slow progress overall in adopting digital business models. Like CIOs in other parts of the world they have seen typical barriers such as Organisational Culture, Scale of Investment, Legacy Infrastructure, Skills and Security holding them back.

However, overall they are typically planning to address them with moves to simplify and modernise infrastructure, work closely with other business colleagues to address specific opportunities, improve training, invest in culture change and generally increase security investments.

In doing so, they are preparing to lead change and more B2B services are likely to emerge, balancing Asia's digital economy.

2018 in Digital

Recently, the UK budget was set with a few old fashioned measures for increasing productivity, Investment in Infrastructure and More Money for Apprenticeships.

I then read someone's blog which suggested that this had missed the mark. His premise was that investment in technology usually fails and there is a need to continue to emphasise other traditional business change and simplicity measures such as clear strategic leadership, process design and email de-cluttering. He produced statistics to show that e-mail costs more than the UK's contributions to the EU's budget. Although I thought that this particular commentary missed the disasters caused by poor collaboration by business leaders and the failure to work together as a unified team.

At the same time, a commentary in Forbes suggested that 2018 will be the year of software automation with a sudden increase in the trading of enterprise data sets and a huge increase in the number of data scientists. Although the breaks to this are whether data sets are considered valuable IPR and the need to train up a lot more people in aspects of data science.

Contino and Gartner have identified 2018 as the year of DevOps with DevOps driving Agile (Gartner) and increasing competition between Platform Vendor services between AWS, GCS and Azure as well as the new wild card entry AliBaba. Interestingly, growth rates for all of these services are in the 50-90% p.a. area. Contino also mentioned that there are many new developments not just in the area of containerisation and serverless computing, but also in improved cloud security via projects such as Calico.

Surprisingly, given the recent frenzies, most commentators were muted on the impact of AI and Machine learning. Likewise, no one bothered to mention the rapidly maturing area of wearable technology or the new promises that quantum computing may at last start to deliver.

Overall, the impression is of Lean Digital becoming mainstream whilst other post digital technologies gradually insinuate themselves into leading edge enterprises.