Ten years ago, hardly anyone owned a smartphone. Today, there are around 2 billion in circulation. What is more, we use them every day to access Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram and many other services that did not exist when the first iPhone was released in 2007.
Yet we are only at the start of a digital technology revolution that will profoundly change how we live and work in the next five years. With artificial intelligence, FinTech especially blockchain, and the Internet of Things coming of age, we can expect digital disruption to accelerate in the years to come.
The previous wave of digital disruption, triggered by mobile technology, caught most CIOs and organisations off guard. Many industry incumbents lost market share to new-age technology companies or experienced declines in brand value and customer satisfaction because they could not keep pace with the demands of a changing customer and employee.
This time, CIOs should ensure that they are better prepared. The difficulty is that we do not really know where the technology will take us. We have a vague sense of the direction, but no clear view of the destination.
Against this backdrop of unrelenting change, the only way to survive is to embrace a culture of innovation. Rather than encouraging teams to stick to the rules, organisations should be ready to experiment, to fail fast, and be able to recover quickly from failure. As futurist Graeme Codrington put it in a recent Sage podcast: The single most important thing you can do to be responsive to change is to experiment. Leaders need to create a mindset and a structure that makes constant experimentation possible.
CIOs are now expected to guide the entire business through new ways of working. An IDC Survey reveals that more than 40% of line-of-business executives view the CIO as the Chief Innovation Officer.
Key takeaways
- Testing new technologies is easier, faster and less risky than ever before
- The risk today is not experimenting, not trying new things and not failing fast
- The difficulty is that we do not really know where the technology will take us
- We have a vague sense of the direction but no clear view of the destination
As the people with their fingers on technology’s pulse, they should embrace their role of championing innovation and agility in the business. It is not as easy as it seems. Aside from the actual technology, they need to start creating an open, collaborative culture where digital natives can grow well. For constant change to work, it also means using today’s open business management solutions and the power of the cloud to quickly and cost-effectively build out new applications and services.
And of course, continual upskilling of the entire team will be needed to keep up – this should happen on a daily basis and should be part of the culture – waiting for annual training seminars simply will not cut it anymore.
We are lucky to live in a time where huge technical infrastructures and a massive IT team are no longer necessary to access world-class technology. Deployment is also fast, provided companies are running an open platform that allows them to easily plug in other services and applications via an API.
Do you want to digitise your factory floor processes and machines to increase automation? Well, today, Internet of Things sensors are cheap and open, and it is easy to provision a software solution from the cloud using nothing more than a credit card. If it does not work out, it is not the end of the world because you have made no heavy infrastructure investments.
Testing new technologies is easier, faster and less risky than ever before. In fact, the risk today is not experimenting, not trying new things and not failing fast. Companies that are not keeping up with the pace of change could find themselves left behind by a changing world—just think about what happened to Kodak after digital cameras and DVD stores after Netflix.
With digital technologies, the CIO must implement and improve in cyclic fashion, explains Keith Fenner at Sage.
