Business Fundamentals & Digital Disruption

A strategic leader with over 28 years of providing successful technology leadership to organizations across industries, Arun has a broad business, strategy, and technology background­ chip design, embedded systems, operating systems and business applications.

A rapid change in technologies and their interlinked use, is leading to a change in the business processes and the value proposition of existing enterprises. This is the digital disruption. Many existing enterprises are seeing this as a threat to their business model, often oblivious to the fact that they themselves may be the result or beneficiary of last digital disruption. Massive opportunities wait those who are able to transform themselves and be the early movers in the evolving world.

Despite the uncertainty around the final shape the products and services will take due to current digital disruption, the fundamentals to lead an enterprise through these changes remain intact.

The need to improve the productivity and efficiency will remain the cornerstone of competitive advantage. This will necessitate people, process and tools changes. The key changes will be the workforce and work environment that's not limited by physical constraints of an office, a computing environment that's not limited to enterprise servers in some private data centers, innovation that's not limited to organizational COEs and success that's not measured by successful deployment in production environment.

The digital disruption has a natural life cycle, though an enterprise may start at any place and move on. As some analyst firm suggest, the three distinct stages may be Industrialization, Transformation and Innovation using the Digital Technologies.

As always, an enterprise needs to have a clear strategy considering the environmental factors. In this case, it means each enterprise must have a clear digital strategy. IT service providers have the added responsibility. Apart from being champions in internally adopting the digital disruption, they need to be the partner to their clients in defining their digital strategies, having done upfront PoCs with the new technologies. While large enterprises may chose a step-by-step and defensive strategy to move to new digital world, the new firms may chose a big bang approach.

The need to improve the productivity and efficiency will remain the cornerstone of competitive advantage

The customer and consumer were always the center point for the business. It has become even more pertinent today with highly connected customers and instantaneous access to opinions and reviews. Fortunately almost infinite amount of the user data has become easily available to. This unstructured data from many sources can easily give intelligent inferences to the business. The ever increasing deployment of IoTs will further bring data that may smartly be used by enterprises to bring customer centric value propositions. Such insight would lead to much higher customer delight and hence business benefits.

While fundamentals remains same, the organization will have to go through a massive change. The biggest challenge is not the digital disruption but as always, it's the will and ability to change in time. It will be but a wishful thinking that this opportunity due to the digital disruption may be handled beneficially without significant organizational strategy, structure, process and system changes. Imagine a race, where the enterprises were running using horses, this digital disruption is akin to introduction of F1 cars in the game. Only those who are able to strategize quickly, train/retain the crew, move from jockey to F1 driver and do it fast, will remain in the race and benefit from it. Successful organisations have to get out there, be in front of the digital disruption and be willing to make those changes and should take advantage of the incredible amount of digital information available.