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Digital Trends & Digital Leadership

22 Jul

What are the key digital trends of 2019, and what are the key traits of successful “digital leaders”?

  1. Digital Trends

Research recently released by Harvey Nash/KPMG, Info-Tech, Gartner and Deloitte have highlighted a mostly shared view of of current and future technology focused trends. The research demonstrates that organisations are changing their product/service offerings or business models in a fundamental way, predominantly driven by digital disruption and the need to get closer to the consumer. 

The combined research demonstrated an increased investment in cyber security, data analytics, AI/automation and transformation. Organisations not investing in AI and automation can expect, over time, for their cost base to be relatively higher than their AI-investing competitors.

The combined summarised view of digital trends is shown in the table below:

Digital trends where 2 or more trends were featured across the four sources

Digital transformation is becoming business as usual as enterprises look to stay ahead of the game. It has been recognized that digital transformation should and can be handled within existing budgets and without extra investment. 

Digital transformations should be business led rather than IT led, to ensure business leaders are fully engaged with how their operations should be optimized for automation and digital change.

2. Digital Leadership

Leading organisations who demonstrate strong digital leadership experience improved time to market, superior customer experience and high operational efficiency. As a result, both revenue growth and profitability are higher too. Today, there is no longer business strategy and technology strategy. There is just strategy, and technology is driving it.

Digital leaders, as opposed to the Digital Management mainstream, have several traits that set them and their organisations apart from the rest. Digital Leaders distinguish themselves as being more outward-looking, using technology as a means of breaking into new markets, engaging with customers and gaining market share. They also tend to have different operating models that focus on the business owning and leading aspects of technology delivery in collaboration with IT.

Digital leaders:

  • Implement new technologies end-to-end across functions and geographies and change the ways of working to maximise value from technology. They use cross-functional teams (IT and business staff) and ensure business leaders work collaboratively to deliver technology change
  • Report business outcome-based metrics for technology projects, and scale up projects quickly if the project is successful or stop quickly if it isn’t.
  • Integrate core business systems with newer digital solutions and bring a long-term ‘product’ rather than a short-term ‘project’ mindset to technology implementation. They employ automation in software development and maintenance, and use methodologies such as agile and DevOps to speed up project delivery
  • Ensure that non-IT staff have the right technology skills, and use both internal and external resources to access the right skills
  • Maximise value from the data they hold and maintain an enterprise-wide data management strategy
  • Identify and manage the key security and privacy issues across technology development and operations, and build customer trust through the service delivered to customers and end user

In essence, digital leadership is about prioritizing value creation over efficiency generation, with a focus on speed and agility. The role is that of influence and partnering with the business rather than about control.

According to Harvey Nash / KPMG, the top 5 Board Priorities for digital leaders are:

  1. Developing innovative new products and services
  2. Delivering consistent and stable IT performance to the business
  3. Enhancing the customer experience
  4. Improving business processes
  5. Increasing operational efficiencies
 
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Posted by on July 22, 2019 in customer experience, digital, innovation, Leadership, strategy, technology, trends

 

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2017 Strategy Considerations

15 Dec
2017 Strategy Considerations

 

This post explores some key innovations and technologies that are worthy of consideration for strategy planning in 2017 and beyond. Whilst each of the technology innovations are at different stages of maturity, hype and utilisation in the market, each should be considered for their potential uses and applicability as part of blue-sky innovation and strategic planning processes.

 

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning include systems that appear to learn, understand, predict and operate with minimal (or no) human guidance. These characteristics make machines appear intelligent. Smart machines intelligent applications can change their future behaviour through learning. Real world examples include robots, autonomous vehicles, drones and virtual personal assistants, intelligent sensors, smart appliances and smart tools (such as a digital stethoscope).

 

The New “Realities” – Virtual and Augmented

Virtual reality (VR) is essentially technology that generates a virtual environment, and simulates a user’s physical presence in this environment through interaction. The virtual environment is separate from the real-world environment, and headwear is typically used to shut-out the immediate surroundings from the virtual world. In a work environment VR can be very beneficial for training, where staff can develop skills in the virtual world without the real-world consequences of failing.

Augmented reality (AR) overlays virtual objects with the environment around you. Unlike virtual reality, which creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it. The most well-known real-world example is Pokomon Go. Other examples include the Topshop AR dressing rooms which allows shoppers to virtually try on new clothes. There is also the Shisedio makeup mirror, the IKEA AR catalogue (to visualise how various furniture would look inside your home) and the IBM shopping app, which provides personalised information whilst browsing the shelves.

 

Mobile Wallet

The use of mobile wallets is continuing to go mainstream, and fully integrated mobile wallets are starting to become a reality. Mobile wallets store payment credentials to enable users to authenticate themselves and/or make transactions from a mobile device. The credentials can be payment-related, such as a bank card, bank account or prepaid card, or non-payment-related, such as a loyalty card or mileage card. There are also closed wallets that allow use at specific merchants and open wallets that allow use at many other merchants. Businesses, retailers and organisations need to embrace this change, and identify the opportunities and risks of the technology.

 

Natural Language Question Answering

Natural-language question answering (NLQA) technology is a type of natural-language processing technology, composed of applications that provide users with a means of asking a question in plain language. A computer or service can answer it meaningfully, while maintaining the flow of interaction.

Unlike information retrieval systems such as search engines, NLQA aims to supply users with “just the right information” instead of merely providing a list of hits. NLQA technology is improving at a rapid pace. Current day examples include SIRI, Cortana and GoogleNow, however they are more like voice assistants and text analysers than true NLQA systems. Future uses in business include the use of NLQA in answering customer queries, contact centre applications and staff training.

 

Analytics

Analytics comes in many variants. Some examples are predictive, prescriptive, real-time, graph, personal and embedded analytics. It is no secret that the use of analytics and business intelligence in helping make and shape business decisions is critical for all organisations. Analytics can be used to transition organisations from a reactive to a proactive mode of operations and must be considered a core enabler of strategic and operational development.

 

Geospatial and location intelligence

Geospatial and location intelligence (GLI) includes applications, infrastructure and tools that enable access to, and utilisation of, geospatial and location data of people, things and information for location-referenced information analysis.

It is estimated that 80% of all business data contains a location component. It is therefore critical to understand how location affects business. Properly analysing location can provide insights that support and improve decision making in virtually anything, including marketing and supply chain logistics and operations. Location intelligence involves layering multiple data sets spatially and/or chronologically, for easy reference on a map.

Location intelligence complements business intelligence – where business intelligence may find one-dimensional relationships between customer demographics or store and warehouse locations, location intelligence enables much deeper dives into the relationships between geography and customer data.

 

Blockchain

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology where transactions are sequentially grouped into blocks. Blockchain is used to track the ownership of assets without the need for a central authority, which speeds up transactions and cuts costs whilst lowering the chance of fraud. Blockchain is widely known as the technology that underpins the digital currency bitcoin. Whilst blockchain is still a relatively new and experimental technology, the ecosystem is growing rapidly and includes start-ups to major technology vendors.

Blockchain comes with cautions however. Considerations include potential lack of transparency, limitations concerning consumption of resources, operational risk from unintended centralisation of resources; and lack of alignment to existing legal and accounting frameworks. There are also potential adoption challenges, including the lack of standards, robust platforms, scalable distributed consensus systems and interoperability mechanisms.

 

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s)

UAV’s include miniature helicopters, airplanes and multirotors that can be remotely controlled by human pilots on the ground or outfitted for autonomous navigation and used to perform aerial surveillance. UAVs typically incorporate GNSS, camera, sonar sensors and navigation systems that guide them for imaging, thermal and spectral analysis. Memory caches and communications links allow UAVs to collect and transmit datasets, as well as transfer them to the cloud for record or instance calculation.

More and more commercial applications for UAV’s are emerging, and there is an increasing number of investments made in UAV start-ups and big companies. Practical examples of commercial UAV applications include parcel delivery, pipeline inspection, disaster inspection, security inspection, and agriculture inspection.

 

 

 
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Posted by on December 15, 2016 in innovation, strategy, technology

 

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Business Transformation – Turning Digital Thinking into Digital Reality

05 Apr
Business Transformation – Turning Digital Thinking into Digital Reality

The digital revolution is here – it is essential for organisational survival, and is now a natural expectation of staff, customers, managers, boards and industry partners.   Failure to embrace digital disruption will ultimately result in significant impacts to organisational efficiencies (at best), or will ultimately lead to organisational demise (at worst).

Organisations are using technologies like social media, mobile, analytics and embedded devices to change their customer engagement, internal operations and even their business models. Whilst there are many organisations that are realising real benefits, many organisations are left wondering how to start the journey, or how to successfully execute a digital transformation.

Based on various studies, research and personal experience, the following key practices are critical in enabling organisations to undertake successful digital transformation:

 

1.  Develop a Vision

Senior leaders need to have a common vision of how to proceed, and weed out the activities that run counter to that vision. They also need to understand why to change, and how the future will be better than the current situation. Without a vision of change, employees tend to do what they have been doing for years, even if it is no longer useful in the digital world. The first step is to understand the threats and opportunities that digital represents to the organisation. Will existing ways of working continue to be effective in a digital world? Are there new opportunities available in customer experience, operational processes or business models? It is also important to assess the organisations digital maturity.

Organisations must change the approach from supporting the business with information technology, to identifying what is possible with digital – starting with mobility, cloud, situational context, and then consider how to get there from here using technology as the catalyst.

2.  Invest in Digital

To realise the digital vision, organisations must invest in the right areas. This includes cutting back in unproductive areas while ramping up investment where it needs to occur. Organisations should choose to excel in a few areas based on existing capabilities such as customer experience, social media, mobile, customer analytics, process digitization or internal collaboration – but not in all.

Organisations will need to consider adapting their business model, which could include adding value to products and services, reaching new customers, linking operational and customer-facing processes in new ways, and even launching entirely new businesses. Strong governance mechanisms are also required to increase the level of coordination and sharing across silo-run digital initiatives.

3.  Organisational Engagement

When employees are engaged in a shared vision they help to make the vision a reality. They offer less resistance to change and often identify new opportunities that were not previously envisioned. It is beneficial to use a wide array of digital channels, such as broadcast, web, video, and social networks to generate continuous two-way communication at scale. Equally important is to encourage employees to identify new practices and opportunities that will advance the vision.

4.  Customer Focus

From a digital solution perspective, focus on user experience design by directly engaging with your customer base. Ask for feedback, challenge current processes, and validate effectiveness. Provision of products or services can be enhanced by engagement with the customer base to understand the demand, and include co-design, enabling greater take-up and the ability for self-service. Provide access to your products and services from anywhere, anytime and on any device, regardless of location.

5.  Cloud First

Investment in cloud based platforms can accelerate the journey to digital, providing opportunities for simplified mobile platform interfaces, use of contextually aware services (utilising customer location, preferences, usage history, etc), context sensitive data integration and data exchange among mobile, big data analytics, social media, internet of things, etc. Develop capabilities to generate forward-looking predictive analytics and overlay with open data sources to truly innovate and provide value.

6.  Sustain the Transformation

Successful digital transformation is built on a foundation of core skills and capabilities. Assess the skills on your teams to insure they fit the new platforms for digital business. Consider hiring some experienced executives who can make an impact quickly and coach existing employees. Redesign your training programs to develop skills your company needs. Where useful, partner with vendors to gain skills and cross-sector experience that complements your capabilities. Senior leaders must focus on building and sustaining momentum for change.

Quantify and monitor progress toward the digital ambition through KPIs or digital scorecards. Scorecards have power beyond just measuring the impact of major investments. They help to change the culture. A shared understanding between IT and business executives is also critical to success.

For a real-world case study (from independent research firm Gartner), please see the link below or contact me via email, linkedin, twitter or this post.

Building a Digital House: How an Industry Regulator Created an Exemplary Public-Sector Digital Service Model

 
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Posted by on April 5, 2016 in digital, general, innovation, strategy, Uncategorized

 

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Key Strategic Considerations for 2014/15

16 Jul

Arguably the three key players in the global ICT research and analytics space are Gartner, Forrester and IDC. These three companies undertake vast amounts of research and analysis pertaining to current and future trends and predictions for ICT and business environments. Throughout the course of any given year, these well respected organisations release their analysis, insights and predictions that every organisation should consider as part of their strategy and planning.

In evaluating and cross referencing the publically available information that has been released from these key players over the last 12 months, there are four high level overlapping themes that emerge which are common across all three organisations.

These are:

  • Cloud
  • Internet of Things (everything)
  • Big Data
  • Mobility

Whilst these themes are high level and of little surprise to many, they provide insight into technologies and strategies that every organisation should consider when undertaking technology research, planning and innovation initiatives. The following content provides some snippets of these key themes…

 

1.  Cloud

Gartner

  • “Enterprises should look to model themselves off of the cloud leaders Amazon, Google & Salesforce. IT organizations should align with and emulate the processes, architectures, and practices of these leading cloud providers.”

Forrester

  • “Public Cloud will be the default backbone for the Internet of Things”.
  • Forrester predicts that Software as a Service will become the new de-facto for buying new applications.

IDC

  • The worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services grew four times more than predicted.
  • “By 2015, one of every seven dollars spent on packaged software, server and storage offerings will be through the Public Cloud”.

 

2. Internet of Things (everything)

Gartner

  • “The Internet is expanding into enterprise assets and consumer items such as cars and televisions. The so called “Internet of Things” will be succeeded by the “Internet of Everything.”

Forrester

  • “Sensors & devices will draw ecosystems together”.
  • “The Internet-of-Things will move from hype to reality with the ubiquity of connectivity and proliferation of devices, and wearable computing will go from niche to broader use”.

IDC

  • “The global Internet of Things market is expected to grow by more than $5 trillion over the next six years”.
  • IDC research predicts “that the global IoT market would hit $7.1 trillion by 2020, as people around the world – and particularly in developed nations – develop an affinity for full-time connectivity”.

 

3. Big Data

Gartner

  • “Big Data – information of extreme size, diversity and complexity – is everywhere and is destined to help organisations drive innovation by gaining new and faster insight into their customers.

Forrester

  • “Firms that embrace big data concepts are creating the next generation smart systems. Cheaper, more agile, collaborative, and adaptive methods for analytics and data sharing are key. Important to design “predictive apps able to sense their environment and respond in real-time, anticipate user action, and meet users in their moment of need.
    • Mobile contextual data will offer deep customer insights and is a key driver of big data.

IDC

  • IDC expects the Big Data technology and services market to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 39.4%, or about 7 x the overall ICT market.

 

4. Mobility

Gartner

  • For mobile application environments, Gartner for 2014 predicts the future lies in HTML5 and the browser .
  • With more users wanting to work across multiple devices, Gartner recommend app developers work to create “building blocks” that can be assembled to fit the needs of different devices.
  • Gartner predicts there will be more popularity in smaller, more targeted apps than more comprehensive, one-size fits all apps.

Forrester

  • Leading organisations are moving to deliver mobile, cloud and big data solutions more readily. Contextual data will offer deep customer insights and is a key driver of big data.
  • Competitive advantage in mobile will shift from experience design to big data and analytics.

IDC

  • By 2015, the worlds mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion.
  • Nearly 1 billion smartphones will be distributed globally in 2015.
  • Predicts Windows Phone will capture the number 2 spot in market share by 2015

 

Some other interesting information that was released…

  • API’s will become the digital glue by providing open access to useful functionality through network-based services.
  • The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT. This will include the proliferation of: contextually aware, intelligent personal assistants; smart advisors; global industrial systems; autonomous vehicles.
  • Gartner statistics predict 3-D printing to grow 75 percent in 2014 alone, with the number of unit shipments doubling in 2015. 3-D printing is a real, viable and cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.

The above content provides just a fraction of the available information released by Gartner, Forrester and IDC, however when all major research companies are banging on the same drum, we should all sit up and take notice.

 
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Posted by on July 16, 2014 in strategy

 

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Do we really need to upgrade to the iPhone 5 ?

19 Sep

It’s that time of year when employees work phones take a swim in the pool, get run over by the car, eaten by the dog or are accidently dropped from a great height. Yes, the new iteration of the iPhone is soon to be released, and employees will be keen to get their hands on the latest smartphone from Apple. Whether many of us like it or not, with each new release of the iphone or ipad, organisations are becoming more entrenched with these devices. A survey from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that 20% of consumers who brought the 3rd generation iPad plan to use the device for business. So it’s only a matter of time before the iPhone 5 makes its way into organisations.

The question is, will the iPhone 5 actually be better for business ?

With a faster processer, more memory and a bigger (4 inch) screen, you may argue that we will be more easily able to consume corporate data. A bigger screen will definitely help with looking at corporate information, business data, dashboards, emails, analytics (not to mention games and the internet). The iPhone 5 is also more capable of streaming media and consuming media-rich mobile apps, and is a more robust and sturdy device thanks to the aluminum backing (which may or may not help with breakages when the iPhone 6 is released !!!).

Are these improvements enough to justify the price premium over purchasing a iPhone 4 or iPhone 4s ?

The premium we currently pay is around $250 for the honor of having a iPhone 5 rather than an iPhone 4. The answer relates to many factors including how the device is used, the content that is consumed on the device and the processes/rules in place around purchasing. An iPhone 5 will certainly satisfy the hunger of those Executives who relish new technology, however making the switch is most likely to be a decision based on individual business circumstances. It may be challenging for organisations to justify the price premium against the benefits received for moving to the iPhone 5.

 
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Posted by on September 19, 2012 in mobility

 

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Big Data Analytics – The Promise for Healthcare

06 Aug

According to research company IDC, data creation is occurring at record rate. In 2010 the world generated over 1ZB of data. By 2014 we will generate 7ZB a year. Much of this data explosion is the result of social media, sensors, smartphones and tablet computers.

Big data involves the extraction of value from a wide variety of large volumes of data. According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute research study, the value of big data is $300 billion annual value to the U.S. health care industry alone. This may seem somewhat ambitious, but it highlights the potential of big data analytics. Mining data from unstructured sources such as twitter feeds and internet blogs, and mashing it up with structured data can produce critical market intelligence.

One of the many new sources of data growth is the healthcare industry. The rapidly evolving healthcare environment is transitioning to electronic medical records and images, introducing sensor networks, utilising health related mobile applications, exploiting RFID tagging and consuming social media. The unstructured data available from these sources (accompanied by structured data within healthcare organisations) can provide enormous insights into fields such as public health monitoring, long-term epidemiological research programs and health trends. Furthermore, with the evolution of mobile telephony via smartphones and tablets, additional data to harvest includes geographic location, text messages, browsing history and motion (via accelerometers). Researchers have already started creating models, using data from Twitter, that enables you to see the spread of infectious diseases, such as flu, throughout a real-life population observed through online social media (http://tinyurl.com/dx8dldd).

Unfortunately, traditional business intelligence (BI) tools may struggle to keep pace with big data. Many BI tools simply are not designed to sift through this much data, or identify meaningful (versus un-meaningful) data. As the amount of data continues to increase, data discovery capabilities will become increasingly important, and existing BI tools will need to evolve to keep up.

For healthcare providers, we need to be aware of not only the potential benefits of big data, but also the challenges that big data provide. According to IDC, these challenges include:

  • Having appropriate IT infrastructure and systems that can analyse and validate high volumes of data
  • Assessing mixed data (structured and unstructured) from multiple sources
  • Dealing with unpredictable content with no apparent schema or structure
  • Enabling real-time or near-real-time collection, analysis, and answers

There is enormous promise in big data analytics, where it could yield a competitive advantage and real consumer health benefits for those willing to step up to the challenge.

 
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Posted by on August 6, 2012 in e-health

 

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