Imagine if I told you a clothing firm was transitioning into a tech company? Or that an automotive manufacturer had eyes on becoming a major IT player? You’d probably wonder what I was talking about, but in the case of US sportswear firm Under Armour and German car giant BMW, that’s exactly what’s happening.
The former has invested over $800 million into health and fitness apps as it strives to drive innovation around connected fitness, while the latter is investing into car start-ups so as to fuel tech innovation in the field of mobility.
Under Armour and BMW are by no means alone in this quest to drive digital transformation across the entire scale and breadth of their organisations. Indeed, Caterpillar now ensures that every machine it produces is connected, enabling each machine to share information with one common technology platform and thereby turning information into a form of competitive advantage.
In all these cases, and too many others to possibly mention, IT is not merely an enabler of the business; it has become the business itself. And in such a scenario the role of the CIO is critical to making all-encompassing digital transformation a reality.
The responsibilities are seemingly endless, but for a firm to turn their digital ambitions into reality, the CIO will at the very least be required to recommend new and emerging technologies that can transform the business, ensure that innovation is integrated into enterprise systems, retool the existing organisation infrastructure to support the transformation, and ensure that IT develops the capabilities to make digital transformation a reality.
But to develop the most effective kind of digital strategy, the CIO must have a clear understanding of the strategic priorities that will inevitably direct the organisation’s digital transformation. Of course, different priorities will take precedence depending on the organisation or industry in question, but there are a number of strategies that all organisations should be keeping an eye on: enabling experiential commerce, utilising data as a strategic asset, and implementing digital operations at scale.
Experiential commerce is considered to be the process of seamlessly blending the digital and physical worlds to enable commerce to take place wherever and whenever the customer wants it to. This is going beyond just omnichannel engagement; it requires organisations to understand not just their customer demographics, but how their customers are currently using technologies across all aspects of their lives.
In this scenario, businesses must understand where their offerings fit into any given customer’s “stream of life”. And in order to be successful, organisations will increasingly need to be able to predict exactly when consumers will adopt new technologies.
In a business-to-consumer ecosystem, this is called consumer digital transformation — the process by which IT products and services are discovered, adopted, and integrated to augment our day-to-day lives. Three major technology categories will shape consumer digital transformation — consumer-facing tech such as mobile devices, wearables, and social/messaging services; augmented reality experiences; and the rise of the intelligent assistant.
The first of these three categories sits has already helped shape the initial wave of consumer digital transformation, but over the coming years we can expect to see a rapid increase in organisations tapping into emerging augmented and virtual reality solutions and technologies such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortona in a bid to drive experiential commerce.
When it comes to utilising data as a strategic asset, this is likely to become a reality for almost all organisations as we move deeper and deeper into the formation of a data-driven economy. This is where raw data and various forms of value-added content will be bought and sold through bilateral transactions or though data brokers.
The emergence of a data-based environment will encompass several evolutionary steps, with organisations initially utilising data to improve their business operations and create new revenue streams. But as technologies such as the internet of Things, cognitive systems, and industry cloud platforms become more commonplace, the opportunities for leveraging a successful and viable data economy will be endless.
The final strategy that encourages all organisations to consider is scaling digital operations in order to deliver hyper-personalised, cost-effective digital services. This ultimately requires the implementation of more autonomic processes in a bid to drive costs down as the volume increases.
Organisations will need to accelerate the speed of innovation by pursuing ideation campaigns and Kickstarter-like funding models to bring new products and services to market faster. Solutions that facilitate autonomous decision making and autonomous operations will also play a key role in enabling digitalisation at scale.
As new technologies continue to emerge, the business landscape as we know it will continue to evolve. But as Under Armour and BMW can attest, the key to capitalising on the transformative power of these new technologies is to place IT at the very core of the business.
— The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC
