Let’s Get Digital – Let your real-time data talk

Become the strategic leader and take your team towards the digital future that is now becoming the greatest competitive disrupter on the planet. Digital is the new competitive differentiator towards long term business benefits and success. The hub apparently is going to be the smart phone in your pocket -connected to all the IoT devices that impact your life or that you choose.

Most of us think digital disruption is not for us, or it is for someone else. That is up until we remind them what a digital disruption the smart phone in your pocket did to the cell phone industry, music industry, search industry, encyclopedias, etc.. and how the very concept of smart phone changed not only the lives of every owner but also of application developers and towards global awareness. This single digital hub you carry in your pocket is just the tip of the iceberg and how you need to transform your industry digitally. Self-driving cars will not only change the auto industry but redefine it. It will impact auto insurances with close to zero accidents, car repair services, and Auto repair shops will become dinosaurs. Self-driven cars will become devices that move people and goods from point A to point B. Imagine no more DUI's or speeding tickets. The global digital transformation is rapidly changing the very definition of industries and services. Smart connected products are changing the world right around us. The important thing is ‘are you reading what’s clearly written on the wall’.

Digital is the new transformation, from Fitbit to cars and machines that communicate with their designated hub and soon with other devices. The world of IoT is already here and the world of Cisco and John Chamber’s IoE is already starting to arrive. The future is clearly digital and the gold in that future is data. The future is in digital enablement- not just the technology but starting with business and customer benefits and then seeing what chips/sensors and communication one needs to tie it all together.

IoT starts with creating and mining bits of digital gold. This is created from sensors, applications and devices. Taking enterprises through this change is being accomplished in two ways. The traditional is the Technology Focused solution. This is where technology alone is seen as the answer to all solutions. These projects are predicted to fail the Business-Benefit score at 0.3, i.e. 70% of these projects will not meet business expectations.  The second and preferred is the Business-Benefit Focused solution. This starts with a leadership sponsored goal of meeting, and often exceeding, business expectations and our ‘Road 2 HANA’ is a proven scientific methodology for taking SAP HANA customers into the world of Big-Data, SAP HANA and IoT with a planned scientific process.

The long term-goal for this is towards building the future QSA Enterprise.

The CIO’s of the new world will not only be people who have grown inside their laptops but who understand the world of business value and business benefits with the same ease. The global enterprises of tomorrow will need to think Digitonomics - find value and deploy rules based digital access and analysis.

Companies need to review their digital potential, create a front seat vision for defining the new digital economy in their industry – this will entail the rewriting of the total social and economic transparency via smart connected devices that have the potential to unify the globe.

Companies need to identify their 7 steps to Digital Excellence

1. Digital capacity: with a focused lean startup methodology
2. Digital Business Design: Design Thinking for the top 8 digital solutions – then prioritize and deploy 1
3. Digital capabilities: What is available what needs to be added or developed-> to meet business benefits / excellence
4. HW, Infra and Network capabilities:  Unified HW, Infrastructure, Network, Communications, Security and sensors administration
5. Dream, Design, Reality to Routine: Business-benefit driven ideation and creation. Take your ideas from Dreams to Reality to routine – one solution at a time.
6. Embrace and create Digital Dust: Embrace the new digital economy and create an iPhone type of digital dust that can permeate all layers of users in your solutions
7. M&E: Finally Maintain and Enhance the Digital experience for your total Value Chain

Other things proactive CIO’s and their key stakeholders need to plan and build:-

1. Digital Opportunity Matrix:  GPS to your strategic digital solution. This is an IT (current location) and Business expectations (Destination)  joint workshop for defining an actionable roadmap from here to there
2. Digital Charter: Identifying the five, ten or twenty things your enterprise needs to accomplish to reach your digital objectives. This would be a list of line items with an executive brief and underlying details
3. Digital Playbook: Realistic operational Roadmap towards leveraging the existing reality to the digital goals as defined in the Charter.

The digital world is rapidly poised to overtake your industry and you need to move fast. However, before you dive into the digitization of your operations, processes and value chain do stop for longer than a moment and think security. Think about a security fabric encompassing all your digital assets whether they be at your enterprise midstream, your partner's upstream or your customer's downstream.