What do companies need to do to get on board the D-Business train? How do you start discovering new digital business models based on value creation around not only people, business, but also things and smart machines? Listening to the Gartner analysts and participants gathered at Gartner #hype14 today, these seem to be some of the cross-disciplinal topics to tackle:
- Get better at identifying new trends and assessing the speed of convergence versus probability of failure
- Learn to accept failure – but only if you also learn to fail fast, correct your direction, and get quickly started again.
- Let go of the not-invented-here attitude, and look for fresh ideas and benchmarking outside your industry vertical.
- Prepare for humongous amounts IoT data coming right at us in the near future – generated by sensors you could barely imagine today, from sub-millimeter devices to smart dust.
- Build data science capabilities to make sense out of the data – with predictive analytics and machine learning.
- Monetize on the knowledge and predictions you extract from the data – turn it into customer experience or other forms of business outcome and added value.
- Turn traditional IT into BiModal IT, a marriage between traditional IT and agile fast-paced business-driven IT – perhaps propelled by a CDO office.
- Enable your organization to engage in adaptive IT sourcing, with different modes of procurement for fast-paced innovative development of digital services, medium-paced differentiating business development, and solid continuous IT operations. One size does not fit all when it comes to negotiating terms with your vendors!
- Last but not least, get the digital initiatives rooted in your strategy – don’t expect basement lab rats to revolutionize your business, without proper C-suite commitment.
For the skeptics – indeed, IoT is currently at the peak of the hype curve, indicating there will be a phase of disappointment before slowly reaching maturity towards the plateau of productivity. Some could say that the necessity of digital business models is somewhere in the same neighborhood. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking about this. As one analyst aptly quoted W. Edwards Deming: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
Which path do you choose?
