• First, the Ingram Micro survey was conducted from respondents attending Cloud Expo Europe, held in London on 12-13 April 2016. The important survey findings are published here, but it’s important to note that it was a tech savvy audience already aware of at least some of the emerging technology issues as they were attending a cloud event to find out more, and so not a general cross section of UK business.
• Secondly, when many digital consultants and end user companies think digital transformation, they are only considering marketing and eCommerce, when actually the digital topic spans the whole of the business process end to end.

So I’d suggest that an even larger proportion of UK business haven’t considered incorporating digital fully in to their business strategy. But why is it so important?  One of the people who have expressed it best was John T. Chambers, the outgoing President and CEO of Cisco, on the opening day of their Cisco Live event on 8 June a year ago. He told the 25,000 attendees, including many of his biggest and best customers:

“Forty percent of businesses in this room, unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years,”

adding that 70% of companies would “attempt” to go digital but only 30% of those would succeed, and then he said:

“If I’m not making you sweat, I should be.”

“It will become a digital world that will change our life, our health, our education, our business models at the pace of a technology company change”

Chambers went on to warn companies that they could not:

“miss a market transition or a business model”
“underestimate your competitor of the future — not your competitor of the past.”
and
“Either we disrupt or we get disrupted”.

Digital Darwinism in plain English – I don’t think the consequences of missing the digital point have been have been expressed with more clarity!

If you want to find out more about this topic I’ve got two recommendations. Read more of the material here, but also consider attending the Enterprise Digital Summit Paris in June. You will know that we co-produce the London edition which will be in November, but we’ll be in Paris next month, and we’d love to see you there to talk real digital business.

John Chambers photo from UK Business Insider, Julie Bort

We are living through a time of immense disruption. We explain it in the presentation as the Digital Enterprise Wave. IDC calls it the Third Platform. Gartner calls it the Nexus of Forces. It doesn’t matter what we call it, but it does mean that everyone’s business model is under threat. You need to transform, but how do you do it? First you have to get educated, and I suggest 3 books you might read covering the global forces at work, the management shift required, and the kind of leadership that organisations need to adopt to start real, digital thinking. Then I’ve added in our definition of Digital Transformation.  There are several you can find (that I link to in my definition blog post) but we believe there are key ingredients missing from some of the explanations you can find.  After that I work through 8 strategic building blocks you need to address to form the basis of the change that your organisations needs to go through. One important factor I bring in that is usually missed by so many is creativity. When we live in a world where content can appear to be free, or we can use low cost resource, or Amazon’s mechanical turk, competing with commodity ideas on price just won’t cut it. More than ever we need to be teaching our kids, our employees, our managers and leaders thinking skills, and we need to make our organisations live and breathe creativity. When your business is under threat and needs a reset, new ideas are the weapons that you need to make progress.

Here is the audio and slides from Monday’s keynote. They did video me, but I guess I was probably jumping around on stage in too animated or distracting a fashion. It was a blast – hope you enjoy it.

So my core message is that the most important of the 8 blocks is that you need to change your and your organisation’s mindset to a permanent state of re-invention.