Digital Divides
Big businesses with aggressive, ambitious digital plans are poised to be the next disrupters. Those without digital strategies (and those unable to translate strategy into transformation) are running out of time.
We all know that digital’s pace is progressing rapidly, while digital technologies are themselves combining and intersecting. The result is a perfect storm, a combinatorial effect that amplifies technological progress and impact exponentially in time (following Moore’s Law). In this environment, applying human, linear time to decisioning would be detrimental, if not entirely dangerous.
In 2017, IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty hosted a gathering of 100 CEOs of top organizations. A CEO Brief by Time Inc. recapped that the group believed they had the assets, data, knowledge, and core expertise to be the next industry disrupters. Many had their digital strategies and business platforms already in place or in process. Strategy aside, the number one impediment cited was the ability to create a culture that could embrace and adapt to technological change.
Depending on whose research you follow, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of organizations have or are working on digital strategies. Laggards in strategy will find themselves falling critically behind as industries such as healthcare, insurance, legal, and finance (to name a few) are fast becoming the next loci of disruption.
We spoke throughout 2017 on the need for executives to aggressively set their digital strategies, define their digital-business platforms, and avoid thinking in linear terms of progress. We stressed culture in action as the top obstacle to – and the glue needed in – these new models.
In 2018, the ability to operationalize these digital strategies by building the capabilities and culture needed in the digital organization will separate the winners from the losers.