We are officially opening our Digital Transformation Lab in Munich, today. Come and join Marc Schuermann from TripleSense, Jörg Naruhn from Marketing and me ;-).
The Omnichannel Value Debate
Great round hosted by Shah Karim at dmexco 2016 on what it needs to make Omnichannel strategies successful. I enjoyed sitting on a panel with Intershop-founder Stephan Schambach and Stefan Wild, Chief Digital Officer at Media-Saturn. Key aspect: you can buy great technology, and you can employ the best marketing&sales strategies – but if you don’t find a way to put organizational change on top of your management agenda, your Omnichannel approach will go bust or not happen at all. Enjoy the video:
Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit
I am attending the Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit in London, today. A truly great event with insightful meetings!
In London with my Reply colleagues Elena Previtera, Marco Barili & Marco Becattini.
Entrepreneur Talks at Witten/Herdecke
I felt honoured talking to a group of students at the University of Witten/Herdecke about entrepreneurship, the importance of values in the Digital Age and about the future of digitization, yesterday. 
Entrepreneur talks (“Unternehmergespräche”) at Witten/Herdecke have an impressive history and leaders and founders such as Friedrich von Metzler, Götz Werner or Claus Hipp were invited in the past. Thanks to the organizers and to Prof. Martin Butzlaff, president at Witten/Herdecke, for having me and for an interesting conversation on the university’s vision of innovation, creativity in the business world and the leadership team’s interpretation of freedom in an ever faster changing world.
Digital Transformation in 2016: What will happen
Much has been publicized on the innovations likely to gain traction and transform traditional businesses in 2016. Some meticulously researched technology reports are available, also touching upon market dynamics as well as key skills required in the digital age. In the following, I have tried to summarize some main findings, complementing them with my personal view on 2016 as a year of digital transformation.
One can argue there are four major categories to talk about when it comes to progress in digital industries this year: geographies and their specific market dynamics; key technologies; priorities for leaders in technology; and key employee skills required around the globe.
Geographies / Market dynamics
India and China are gaining in technology innovation. Companies there – more than ever before – are reacting to specific needs within their local markets, delivering bespoke products, product features and, overall, services. Manufacturers such as Xiaomi, building on customer feedback from Asia, are interestingly starting to grow their popularity with international customers.
Of course, Silicon Valley will remain the world’s leading economic hotspot. And we can expect further waves of technology disruption emanating from there in 2016. More than any other technology cluster or hub on the Planet, the Valley today stands for incubators, accelerators, and further key approaches to innovation and quick execution.
At the same time, hubs like Shanghai, Bangalore or Tel Aviv, to name a few, are successfully attracting digital talent, startup-entrepreneurs and – foremost – VC and private equity money. The same is true for Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia or Thailand.
Key technologies
IDC, a leading global provider of market intelligence, have published ten projections for 2016 with „Third Platform“ ranked high on the list. The term „Third Platform“, according to IDC, is to encompasses technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Cognitive Computing, Robotics, Augmented Reality, 3D Printing, and Next-generation Security.
I would agree with the pick as the technologies are enablers or drivers of digital transformation. How powerful and transformative a combination of some of those technologies may be, is simply stunning. In an interview with ZDNet, Ralph de la Vega, CEO and president for AT&T’s mobile and business units, told the following story: „I was in London two months ago. When I opened the Financial Times, the cover story was that black cabbies – the famous black cabs – were shutting down their training school. It takes three years for a cabbie in London to go through that school. They told me an unbelievable figure that in average, they fail the test 12 times before they pass it. They were shutting the school because of Uber. Now, Uber is our customer. It’s Uber’s use of the smartphone, applications, mobile broadband and the cloud built into the smartphone and smart enough apps that they may not be able to do it exactly as good as a cabbie does, but good enough that people are using Uber. So for an institution like that for it to close its doors, it highlights the point that either you accept and embrace these technologies and disrupt yourself – or you will be disrupted by people who use them.“
What Ralph de la Vega is actually talking about is the transformative power of the Internet of Things (IoT). 2016 will be the year revealing what IoT really means to traditional businesses. It will be eye-opening and mind-blowing. For De la Vega IoT is he „next Industrial Revolution“. I could not agree more.
Priorities for leaders in technology
So how do leaders in technology adapt to the challenges triggered by recent developments in digital industries? Gartner have published this year’s list of ten priorities („Technology Priorities for CIOs in 2016“) which I find interesting as it reflects the disruption to come. Certainly, one can discuss the ranking of the topics, one can discuss the topics as such, one can ask the question if this list really reflects the needs in 2016 (which may be different across industries and companies). At least, I haven’t yet found a better one:
- BI/Analytics
- Cloud
- Mobile
- Digitization/Digital Marketing
- Infrastructure & Data Centre
- ERP
- Security
- Industry Specific Applications
- CRM
- Networking/Voice/Data Communications.
Key skills
Finally, how about individual skills required to master the challenges of a digital corporate environment that is constantly changing, at ever faster pace? Here, I wanted to take a different angle. I spotted a report of the „most coveted certificates“, published by Coursera, a leading educational technology company that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs). Coursera works with universities and organizations to make information and courses available online and to offer certifications. The following list from Coursera I found definitely worth sharing:
- Digital Marketing
- Data Science
- Interaction Design
- Business Strategy
- Strategic Business Analysis
- Data Science at Scale
- Genomic Data Science
- Organizational Leadership
- Social Media Marketing
- Strategic Management and Innovation.
This list reflects that change is coming. Ready, steady, go.
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 840 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 14 trips to carry that many people.
The big Buzzword „Digital Transformation “: Pains and Cures
Of course, most leaders would agree that digital transformation (DT) is key to their company’s future. And of course, they would underscore that the company is already on its way. But, what does that actually mean? What way are we talking about, and – looking back at 2015 – what are key takeaways with regards to: pains that come with a transformational state; successful digital strategies; roadmaps and execution plans?
In the following, I would like to list my personal five 2015 takeaways.
1.) If you have no clue, put integration first
„Where to start – and how?“ This question has been common across industries when it comes to DT. For sure, at least one of an advisor’s answers has been among the following: focus on customer experience and think about use cases first; simplify your processes; become more agile in your IT. All these answers may not be wrong per case. What really matters though is the degree of digital integration, foremost defined as follows: ability to build an ecosystem of partners exploiting APIs; seamless communication between layers of software within a flexible IT architecture; consistent processes across touch points. Integration defined along those lines – this is where the thinking should start. The rest will follow.
2.) If traditionalists are telling you it’s too complex and too expensive, go greenfield
„This will cost a fortune, it’s risky, we can’t do it at that pace …” Of course, there are good reasons for traditionalists within an organization to argue like this when confronted with disruptive DT initiatives. But balancing the risk of not going fast and not driving DT (which can finally put the company at risk) with the opportunity emerging from DT may lead to a greenfield approach. This means: Consider to build a completely separate IT environment – it may be the foundation of your future company (and business model). It has never been easier to approach an IT revolution than today. Think about the benefits of cloud-based solutions, specifically of moving infrastructure to the cloud.
3.) Be honest with yourself: You may not have the right people, nor the right organization. Change it, and change it fast
A former CEO from the TIME industry told me: You need to build your team as if you were a soccer coach, tasked with winning the world cup! Unfortunately, he built a team that didn’t win, mainly because he used his gang of the past and simply gave the individuals new orders (which some of them had no clue about). Face it: DT is all about people. Get those on board who know how it works – and let others go. There may be a learning curve for some employees, but for most of them it may unfortunately be too long … And when the right ones are on board, start building a DT organization focused on collaboration rather then politics; value the benefits of co-working set-ups where business and IT people are working closely together; and hire an HR team that can manage the change that is required in a speedy fashion.
4.) Accept it: If you are not fast enough, partner
Sometimes, it’s hard to accept that main competitors in your core business or some specialist providers are simply faster in delivering innovation to end-customers. In this case, does it make sense to try to get there by catching up? Don’t do it. Better look for standardized solutions out of the box and try to cater them to your needs if the standard doesn’t suffice. A number of clients that we have been advising for quite some time now, all followed our recommendation as they balanced speed with ambition – and speed turned out to be key to perform and survive.
5.) Knowledge Management (KM) and Knowledge Transfer (KT) are becoming key to your company’s success. Prepare for this major challenge
A myriad of words has been published on corporate knowledge management and knowledge transfer. And it’s a truth that in most companies KM and KT are not working as well as they should be. This is unfortunate as DT also means: communicate much faster internally and create a learning society of ambitious knowledge workers willing to transform the business. This will only work though if knowledge is being shared, if access to general data on projects and detail is easily accessible – and if processes are in place that enable knowledge transfer between individuals and groups of people. So, think about appropriate initiatives to invest into and drive KM and KT – it will pay off faster than you think.
Let us fight Bureaucracy
netzwirtschaft.de put it together in a nice way (in German, though): #fightbureaucracy
How Search Engines challenge Media Policy
By chance, I stumbled upon a book on search engines (in German only), and how they challenge media policy, that was published ten years ago. I was among the authors.
Reading key parts of the book today and seeing what happened over a relatively short period of time is stunning. The book is still available on amazon, and I think it is still worth a read if you are interested in the power of search engines, their influence on our thinking on how this has evolved. Here you go: http://goo.gl/v4OsQf .
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