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.

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.