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Tag: digital age

  • IT Enables Scale in Digital Transformation

    IT Enables Scale in Digital Transformation

    Few corporate functions have seen their role disrupted as much as IT these last few years. The help desk days are long gone. As digital transformation accelerates, IT is becoming less about outright technology and more about creating capabilities that enable the overarching business strategy. As such, IT is the engine behind any company’s digital transformation.

    Here are three ways IT can advance today’s digital journey by empowering the business from a consultative, strategic position.

    Going Digital While Digitizing

    First, let’s agree on digital transformation’s foundational terms, which understandably elicit some ongoing confusion: “digitization” and “digital,” which the MIT Center for Information Systems Research has described as two discrete yet complementary things. In short, digitization is about leveraging technology to improve or enhance business processes, operations and offer development. By contrast, going digital is about giving customer value to digitization—with the goal of revolutionizing the customer experience and creating new digital business models. What’s the point of digitizing a process or product if the user experience is poor? 

    Balancing these complementary efforts is essential. It is the role of IT to ensure that digitization and digital can happen at the same time. 

    Rethinking the Economic Model

    To keep up, IT must move away from traditional demand-based models, enabling capabilities with a product mindset instead of a time-bound project mindset. The concept of capability (that is, a business area enabled by a consistent set of IT products) is quite critical to avoid creating one-off or point solutions that are just the means to answer to a specific demand. Instead, looking to IT as the enabler of corporate practices that are always evolving and improving (e.g., cybersecurity) is imperative. Embracing Agile methodologies will bring this approach to fruition.

    Pivoting to this kind of a capability-based model requires a modern API-based architecture, which fundamentally is the way out of building and/or replacing monolithic systems. As today’s world requires a fine balance of speed and frugality, a mastery of resource allocation, and a prioritization rigor, we must unburden resources aimed at replacing systems that are working just fine. 

    To that effect, Amazon Web Services has a great architecture principle referred to as “two is better than zero.” In other words, it is better to have two similar IT components emerge from fast-paced, parallel development than nothing due to project bottlenecks and unmastered interdependencies. Even if we want to drive re-use every time we can (and have mechanisms for that), we should not bog down overall transformation due to one weighty project. So thinking in terms of not just tolerating diversity, but enabling it, is a good way to built an architecture that can empower both agility and resiliency.

    Addressing Technical Debt Continuously

    Technical debt is perhaps every incumbent company’s biggest challenge when going digital. The cost of maintaining legacy and outdated systems is high, and heavy technical debt is another obstacle to achieving full digital transformation. Accenture consultants see this every day, describing this burden as a price that “hinders [companies’] ability to innovate and adapt in the digital age.” 

    This is where IT can come to the rescue by having a structured approach and engagement model designed to streamline systems and processes in order to free up resources for reallocation. First focus on eliminating legacy custom-built applications and localized tools based on criteria that are well known and shared (think of a scoring system). Here, again, resource allocation can play its part by ensuring the full cost of those legacies is being recognized by the organization. 

    A huge added advantage of a continuous effort to remove technical debt (beyond cost, the reduction of obsolete systems and a simplified IT landscape) obviously relates to security. Especially at a time when the average cost of a single data breach globally is $3.9 million. In fact, potential cybersecurity and IoT-related physical safety concerns “will pressure CIOs at G2000 companies to increase IoT security spending by up to 25%, temporarily neutralizing business productivity gains” by 2020 (IDC). Redirecting technical debt can offset part of this essential spending on security.

    Accenture notes that 79% of CEOs report that their organization is adopting new and emerging technologies faster than they can address related security issues. IT teams therefore must carry the security torch, determining and implementing ways to make security easier for employees while also protecting the end-to-end digital ecosystem. A continuous effort to reduce the technical debt is one way—among many others—to improve posture. 

    A Place at the Digital Transformation Table

    Indeed, these are exciting times for every business. Digital is all about creating customer value, guided by a better understanding of customer needs deeper in the enterprise. Since providing a great experience is not only about the user interface but also about the ability to mobilize the internal systems in order to deliver at scale, IT experts now have a major seat at the table for revolutionizing the customer experience at scale.

    The essential ingredients to full digital transformation are clear: digitizing and going digital, being able to embrace emerging technologies with an architecture that makes diversity efficient when required and creating cyber citizens that continuously reduce the corporation’s technical debt. Behind the scenes and now front and center, IT is pushing forward the transformation strategy for companies staking a competitive claim in today’s digital economy.

    — Hervé Coureil

  • Technology: Isolation in the Age of Automation

    Technology: Isolation in the Age of Automation

    Dependence on technology makes us more independent overall, but it also makes us more isolated. So, what happens if things come to the point where we depend on machines more than we depend on other human beings?

    Earlier this month I attended a presentation about machine learning on mobile phones at Google IO 2019. Right now Google is spending a lot of time and money developing machine learning models and capabilities that operate solely within the mobile device. No connection to the internet is required. It’s a big deal.

    During the presentation, the company showed a video that featured an illiterate woman in India who uses her phone’s text recognition features to read to her. All she needs to do is point the phone’s camera at a recipe or newspaper and the phone converts the text to speech.

    I found the story inspiring as a technologist and as a human being. But it’s not all peaches and cream. At the end of the video, the woman said something that gave me pause. When talking about using the technology to book a train ticket, she said, “I can book it myself. I don’t need anyone’s help.”

    There’s no doubt the phone liberated her, very much in the same way that the light bulb liberated millions of other people in times past, bringing human activity forward beyond the setting sun. Dependence on a particular technology can create greater independence overall. However, I do wonder what happens when things evolve to the point where we depend on machines more than we depend on others, when we no longer need “anyone’s help.”

    To my thinking, human interdependence is the thread that binds the fabric of a society together. The thousands of little interdependencies that make up the human experience have beneficial side effects. To get along, we learn the basic rules of civility. We learn to say “please” and “thank you.” We learn how to wait in line at the DMV. We pick up after our dog. We open the door for others. It’s all part of the implicit contract that makes living with other people possible.

    But, these days it seems we depend more on machines than the kindness of strangers. The fact is, you don’t have to be nice to a machine, even for a self-serving purpose. You can yell at your cell phone. You stick your tongue out at the ATM as it accepts your deposit. Whether you’re nice to it or not doesn’t matter. Your deposit is not going to be processed any faster or slower. Your cell phone isn’t going to disconnect you because you were rude to it.

    Take away these simple rules of civility and strange things happen. It’s interesting that road rage is common, yet sidewalk rage is rare. Maybe wrapping ourselves up in a piece of silicon-powered transportation hardware predisposes us to a hostile attitude when interacting with others in the same situation.

    As I stated earlier, depending on technology makes us more independent in the big picture. But, it also makes us more isolated. Whereas in the past, talking about the weather with a stranger might be a prelude to another conversation that’s more meaningful, today the stranger next to me usually has his ears plugged up listening to his own interests. And, if I really want to know about the weather, I can ask Alexa.

    Modern technology gives me help on demand. I no longer ask a stranger for directions to the train station, I use my phone. It seems as if I need the help of others less during those small, random moments of vulnerability. A machine is but a voice prompt away. And, thus, the thread that binds me to the world at large gets a little bit looser.

    Now don’t get me wrong—isolation is nothing new. Five hundred years ago most people never traveled far from where they were born except on very special occasions. Village life is a case study in group isolation. But, while villages were isolated from the outside world, inside the village it was a different story. The social fabric was dense; the threads were tight. Being shunned by the group was a matter of life and death.

    Today we’re all over the place, literally. But we move in our own domains in which we end up wishing happy birthdays to people we’ve never met but who somehow have meaning to us by way of LinkedIn, Facebook and the plethora of other social platforms brought to life and sustained by something other than human labor.

    Is this such a bad thing? Dunno. I like it that my phone is now my personal stenographer. It helps me think better. But, I’m not sure that Google Assistant will ever be a good best friend. What’s even stranger is that a time might come when I don’t even need one. It will be just me and my mobile device. Then I won’t need anyone’s help, ever.

    — Bob Reselman