Jack Welch once remarked, ‘If the rate of change on the Outside exceeds the rate of change on the Inside, the end is near’! We have often heard information to be the new currency in this digital-first generation. When we dig deeper into the ever-rising tide of information, we still see a lot of analog currency transactions corroborating Gartner’s belief that most organizations lack the skills and knowledge to successfully execute a digital strategy. By 2020, information will be used for reinventing 80% of business processes and products from a decade earlier.

Ray Kurzweil introduced the concept of the ‘Law of Accelerating Returns’ to depict the exponential rate of change of technology in his book “The Age of Spiritual Machines”. Gartner makes the prediction of 25 billion sensors by 2020, data doubling every two years and a 5X growth through 2017. Are we equipped to embrace such technology abundance?

Digitization is exerting unprecedented pressure on organizations to evolve as Standard & Poor’s data shows how the average corporate lifespan of leading companies is falling from 61 years in 1958 to just 18 years in 2011. Making ‘potentially’ disruptive technologies that do not improve performance don’t, in the least, make them disruptive.

Adoption of Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, IoT is made accessible to one’s competitors and doesn’t by itself provide sustainable competitive advantage; differentiation lies in adopting smarter, original and quicker integration of such technologies. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ approach to independently experiment can yield success but cannot scale to mark digital transformation across the business.

The lean management concept of the work cell can work wonders to the digital factory at ensuring cross-functional expertise to scale the digitization effort at all levels. How does one embed structured predictability and agility at the same time to different cross-functional work cells? This is what separates the high performers that treat IT as a strategic asset and perform Digital Alchemy from the ones in a state of Digital Entropy. It’s not about sustaining disruptive innovations but beating the performance curve in an age seized by technological terror.

difgitization

  • Digital Entropy is a state of the enterprise at variance with its digital strategy implementation and low adoption of emerging technologies. The state of digital integration in the current system doesn’t capture value for the employees and customers.
  • Digital Enthalpy is a condition which is hot on digital and is on top of the agenda for the enterprise with every emerging technology adopted with alacrity to the point of it losing synergies with the rest of the infrastructure. It’s a case of first-mover advantage without firmly capitalizing to integrate seamlessly into the current infrastructure.
  • Hybrid Enthalpy is the condition that enterprises manage within their converged systems and traditional IT to interact for synergies across the enterprise given their change resistance to innovative technologies. Such organizations believe in a high level of information and system consolidation in their existing infrastructure at the cost of technological change.
  • Digital Alchemy is the state every enterprise would want to attain, distilling the best out of every asset and technology synergistically to redesign operations and innovate with disruptive forces to digitally transform the enterprise. The transformation into a hybrid model maintains the enthalpy of the whole system functioning at an optimal level for digital success.

The question is: Where does your organization want to be and what are you doing to get there?

It’s in the journey of Digital Discovery, one step at a time that gives rise to a state of Digital Alchemy– one that is nurtured through an optimal enthalpy of technological excellence for business growth and individualized customer experience.

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