The "Digital Revolution"
We are amidst what I believe historians will call the 4th Industrial Revolution, the "Digital Revolution". It is tougher today than every before to compete and win at business, while at the same time it is easier than ever before to launch a new business that disrupts an industry.
In the past it took traditional businesses on average 80-100 years to reach 1B in revenues or valuation. The mid 90s gave way to a new era of businesses that are growing faster than ever before. The invention and mass adoption of the internet and web browser are attributed as the main keys to success for the first wave of transformation.
Bring on the mass adoption of mobile, cloud computing, social networks and new development paradigms we are seeing faster growth than ever before. The latest crop of companies are able to disrupt industries and reach the goals of their legacy predecessors in as little as 4 years (Uber). While others, truly 100% digital companies have achieved this feat in as little as 12 - 24 months (YouTube, Twitter).
You can lie to yourself and say it won't happen to me. Many people in traditional industries (energy, banking, healthcare, transportation) had the luxury of limited competition in the past. That is no longer the case, no one is safe. You had better pinch yourself and wake up. In the last decade alone, Uber has disrupted the transportation industry, AirBnB has done the same in lodging and don't forget Amazon as they have disrupted retail. Then there's Tesla who is eating away at two industries at once, transportation and energy. By the way, all these businesses have very traditional, physical components to their business model.
How are they doing it? How do you pivot to stay relevant?
It starts with realizing you need to transform and considering every aspect of your business from the core model itself, the Go To Market (GTM) approach and how you leverage technology to accelerate your ability to change quickly and constantly.
First and foremost you need to identify the business drivers that are requiring you to change.
Here are some examples to get you started:
Customer Experience - create omni-channel experiences that help you retain existing customers and land new ones, provide self service and leverage AI/ML to reduce operational overhead.
15% of all customer service interactions will be handled solely by AI in 2021, a 400% increase from 2017. *Gartner
Faster Time to Market (TTM) - shorten product development cycles from ideation thru creation, fix critical bugs faster to improve user experience, the ability to A/B test new features on small portions of your user base to understand what features you should be working on.
By 2022, 90% of all apps will feature microservices architectures that improve the ability to design, debug, update, and leverage third-party code; 35% of all production apps will be cloud-native. *IDC
Business Agility - geographic expansion, spin up new data centers around the globe and deploy your solution in 6 weeks instead of 6 months, acquire and integrate companies faster to drive growth, launch new products.
By 2022, over 40 percent of organizations' cloud deployments will include edge computing, and 25 percent of endpoint devices and systems will execute AI algorithms. *IDC
Next, once you have identified what the business needs in order to stay relevant. You need to radically change the way you think about and execute the work required to make it a reality.
The IT organization needs to change the way they work too.
IT needs to stop:
Building and deploying networks, servers and applications by hand.
Pitching the problems over the fence, you need to break down the silos you built that you may even attribute to your success this far.
Supporting the culture and processes that are broken, resulting in business stakeholders swiping their credit cards for solutions or waiting months to get what they need.
Using old patterns in a new world, building monoliths, trying to fit that shinny new container platform into a zoned based security model.
Doing all your design work up front....waterfall.
IT needs to start:
Leverage Agile to break work efforts into smaller, achievable pieces. No more waterfall, leverage Agile to drive down costs and increase efficiency. Think and act like a startup!
Break down the silos by reorganizing into smaller cross functional teams. Layering on your Agile product management. Build teams to support the product soup to nuts and move decisions to the line. You built it, you own it!
Latch on to new processes in the industry that drive acceleration in your IT organization. DevOps/SRE for the win!
Automate everything, no more human operators or human errors should make their way into production systems. Software Defined Networking, Software Defined Data Centers, Software Defined Application Deployments. Leverage Infrastructure As Code (IaC), CI/CD and other automation tools & techniques to drive 100% successful deployments!
Build new solutions from the ground up, throw out outdates engineering practices in favor of new concepts like Microservices, Containers & Kubernetes. Microservices are the future for highly scalable applications!
If you want to survive this Digital Revolution you are going need to rethink the way you work. It will require 100% dedication to the plan and execution. Many before you have tried and failed, I am not sure of all the reasons. The one I have heard most that has stuck with me is the inability to fully commit to the new plan. This commonly happens when a business is addicted to toxic revenue. Consider a business like Netflix, they surely knew by launching a streaming business they would be cannibalizing their existing DVD distribution business. You had better get comfortable disrupting your own business models along with your competitors.
How do you get started?
There are many ways to get started, some companies take a top down approach where executive leadership is already bought in, while others need to execute a greenfield project or two to build momentum and get executive buy-in. If you already have executive buy-in then it can be good to start with an assessment or building a strategy roadmap. In cases where you need to build credibility to get sponsorship you should start small. Many of the customers we work with start with a Proof Of Concept (POC) or workshop to gain momentum.
If you need help getting start, we can help. IGNW is a full stack professional services company focused on Digital Transformation. We offer services to help with strategy, planning and assessments. As well as engineering services to execute on your whole plan or pieces of it. Don't go at it alone, leverage our team of experts that have been developing and executing these transformations and have the scars to prove it!