Everyone’s talking digital – either disruption or transformation and it’s dangerous. Plenty of books with digital in the title and that’s dangerous. Plenty of events around the digital topic and that’s dangerous too. It’s dangerous because this is too important a topic to be diluted by being overhyped. We’re actually talking about business survival in a World where the only constant is change, and that change is accelerating. So where are we at and what can you do to make sense of the hype?
First, we’ve been talking digital since Nicholas Negreponte published Being Digital and Don Tapscott published The Digital Economy 20 years ago, but things have really come together over just the last few, and the disruption and transformation messaging has got loud in just the last one. Loud enough so that John T Chambers, who is about to step down from Cisco after taking his company through another major reorganisation, told the 25,000 attendees, customers and prospects at his last big event:
“Forty percent of businesses in this room, unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years,”
and then telling them 70% of companies would “attempt” to go digital but only 30% of those would actually succeed.
That matches up with Brian Solis highlighting the digital transformation divide in his review of the year back last December:
Around about the same time, Ray Wang of Constellation Research (who has written one of the essential, recent books on the topic – see later) started a blog post:
“The stage is set for Digital Transformation to be one of the hottest trends for 2015. Market leaders and early adopters have already embraced the movement. Yet, massive hype is coming soon as digital transformation hits mainstream awareness by late 2015.”
And let me add something from a diginomica piece by Stuart Lauchlan from last week. He reported on Jack Ramsay, Global Technology Delivery Director at Accenture Digital Business Group, who delivered his own digital strategy in a keynote during London Tech Week:
“What I still see is a lot of companies saying digital is going to be important. My point is is that digital is not going to be important, it’s going to be everything. If you don’t get that and you don’t get that quickly, then it’s going to be a problem.”
Put all of this together and something very dramatic is happening, it’s accelerating, and it’s being hyped. How do we make sense of it? How do we pull all of these threads together and figure out how to compete, how to create value, how to ride the wave of these forces?
You need to get educated, you need to figure out what works, and what doesn’t and you need a plan. To get educated, here’s a definition of digital transformation, and out of the many books around the subject I’d like to recommend 2….
Leading Digital by George Western, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee. They highlight how large companies in traditional industries from finance to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals are using digital to gain strategic advantage. We need to get practical, and these ideas help.
Disrupting Digital Business by Ray Wang where he explains how we should focus our attention on experiences and outcomes. Check out his sequence of articles that summarise the key messages in the book and you’ll want to buy it to learn more.
Then to help you figure out what works, what doesn’t and to formulate a plan, we’ve put together an event with our friends at Kongress Media. On October 22nd we are co-producing the 2nd edition of the Enterprise Digital Summit London at The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace. We will be addressing the mindshift required and the management challenges of making this digital transformation work end to end in your business. We will cover the digital topic and social collaboration techniques, but our emphasis will be on the employee, customer, partner and stakeholder behaviours you need to encourage and the issues of management and corporate culture that you need to address to put these new technologies to use. Let me talk through some of the great speakers we have on the agenda.
The opening keynote will be from Stowe Boyd. Stowe’s a futurist, researcher, a bit of a maverick and describes himeself as an edgling. He has been helping us make sense of technology and how it affects the world of work for decades. He coined the term “social tools” in 1999 and the term “hashtag” in 2007. We are delighted to have his insight kicking things off.
Our second keynote is from Vlatka Hlupic, Professor of Business and Management at Westminster University. Last year she published a book called The Management Shift on her research from over 20 companies who have been using her approach and leadership model. They are from small to large, in various sectors and include a FTSE 100 Company. She’ll be presenting her model of 5 levels of emergent leadership.
We have practical case study stories from Vodafone and Pearson, and a great collection of industry speakers and commentators. Along with those speakers there will be some great panel discussions, and the chance to participate in a number workshop sessions around transformational change management, digital workplace management, community management and adoption of social tools.
If you are interested in joining us, cutting through the hype and broadening your mind around digital, then go here for tickets and full details. All this talk around the “d” word may be dangerous, but it’s essential.
(top image from Altimeter 2014 State of Digital Transformation images on flickr)
[…] Everyone’s talking digital – either disruption or transformation and it’s dangerous. Plenty of books with digital in the title and that’s dangerous. Plenty of events around the digital topic and that’s dangerous too. It’s dangerous because this is too important a topic to be diluted by being overhyped. We’re actually talking about business survival in a World where the only constant is change, and that change is accelerating. So where are we at and what can you do to make sense of the hype? […]