Digital Disruption - As your companies DNA gets strained by the digital march across traditional boundaries

I have been asked to present a short “digital disruptive” talk at our upcoming Enterprise World event.  I thought I would take a moment to share the core aspects of the discussion.   My session is titled Digital Expectations while Working Analogue.

Regardless of industry or type of business, manufacturing, resource, service, or government, none are immune to the persistent march of digital expectations of your customers.  The impacts are significant and some serious disruptive take downs as digital flexes its muscles.  The world is changing at a very rapid pace with impacts that we may not be ready for at the enterprise level.   There seems to be two very distinct waves that are impacting companies.   The first really lives and breathes where the company and customer interact.  The second more subtle and with a bigger impact spreads across the entire enterprise and demands rapid change.   It is to the second point that the comment digital expectations while working analogue applies. 

What do I mean by analogue?     I am deliberately using the term analogue counter pointed with digital to heft the idea that there is a digital demand that can easily shift the very nature of the company away from traditional operational norms.  Specifically, digital expectations by the customer will reach right into the operations or heart of the company expecting the same fantastic experience that is offered as the digital experience.  More on this later, let me describe analogue.  The first example: editing a vinyl Record is to editing Digital Music.  Same song, different technology some may say a richer experience (sound) from the vinyl record.  Arguably, the digital aspects of editing the same song in much simpler than that of the vinyl record.  One you have to go back to the original master and recast the record, while the other ships with many of today’s computers.  If your company based on the vinyl record that is a hard to adapt business processes and is faced with the demanding digitally disruptive unforgiving customer, where do you end up?

What expectations are shifting and are they really shifting?   Looking at various industries there different examples that show the double impact.  Some from the inside of the organization outwards and others from the outside in.  Example, the manufacturing industry has for many years been going through a slow march towards a digital experience from the production floor to the supply chain.  Most of the influence can be placed with the need to cut costs, deal with globalization, and shift to delivery schedules that marry with high efficiency supply chain to the consumer.   Another example, service sector or even government has been pushed by their customers to adapt rapidly from the outside in. 

The digital experience of choice booking an air ticket is slowly catching up to the actual travel experience in terms of interaction and access to information.  Smart city is slowly getting smarter.  Governments are now allowing citizens to use a single point of contact to get birth records or license renewals.  Before that was a multiple form, multiple department adventure. 

Regardless of B2B, B2C, B2G the slow march of digitization is happening.  Some earmarks that your organization is shifting may be, your customer’s experience, the needs to be mobile first, soon followed by self-service, and proactive customer interaction, operations data being supplied to customers, finally smart Ai will soon be your norm.  None of this will happen without realizing that there may be analogue processes that need to be unlocked so that data can be reused, shared, digitized to make the shift.  This is not to say your company does not function well, rather the impact as your companies DNA. 

As your companies DNA gets strained by the digital march across traditional boundaries there are great examples of where other companies have embraced technology to make the jump.  Definitely not an easy shift, something along the lines of changing a wheel while zipping down the highway.  Guaranteed not to be a fun ride.  Deciding if you are up for making the shift, is not really up to you, rather it is up to your customer, the incessant drive to change your companies DNA to be digital. 

What to do, to find out how digital your companies DNA really is, and can you shift to be more digital throughout your company.  We have developed a digital readiness guide to assist in the evaluation.   Use the guide thinking of the operations part of the company and not the already massaged customer centric digital efforts.  You may be surprised as to how far down the digital road you may or may not be.

Why Connect Unstructured Content to Structured Processes and leverage critical or Big Data?

Most enterprises and government agencies today have invested in enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, analytics, business process management, and supply chain management, to support their core business. These applications have proven their value in enabling operational efficiency. They excel at managing highly structured, transaction information such as addresses, customer numbers, information about a an asset like a pump, or infrastructure hidden below ground like a gas pipeline through a community, or purchase order numbers used in business processes. 

Similarly, facing a rising flood of unstructured information – e-mail, regulations and procedures, contracts, photos, and much more – many organizations have adopted enterprise information management (EIM) applications to coordinate and control that content. EIM applications offer numerous services to help users create, collaborate on, share, store, archive, and eventually destroy this content.

The worlds of structured business processes and unstructured content are continuing to grow closer to one another. Large organizations are faced with two problems, where and how.  Where is the single source of the truth, and how do we get it to be shared across the enterprise. This can cause critical problems and stagnate the evolution of the company, especially where the push to drive digitization is accelerating. In almost every customer- or partner-facing process, extensive unstructured information is exchanged.

Looking at the problem from the content perspective, the moment it arrives or is created, its author and recipient understand its full context, and thus its importance. But soon that memory fades, and the content, stored haphazardly on desktops, shared drives, or stand-alone applications, is effectively lost to the organization. Even if an individual recollects its existence and location, there is no connection maintained between the content itself and the context of the business process that made it relevant in the first place. The lack of authoritative information relating to a business process is one of the greatest sources of legal risk facing large companies today.  For example:

An Energy or Manufacturing Company.

Energy companies like many manufacturing companies are asset intensive and highly regulated primarily for safety and environmental purposes.  The information created by an engineer, provided by a consultant, or vendor related to an asset is critical for different kinds of information requirements; documents, data and drawings for functional locations, materials, maintenance cycles, change management and so forth.  The operators require a single source of truth ensuring accurate and updated versions of the content.   This sounds simple, however multiply the complexity across every piece of rotating equipment, pumps for example, every pressure vessel, every valve, and every pipe segment and you get the idea.  Further complicate this problem with an aging workforce require knowledge management, collaboration, and seamless access to policies and procedures and the problem escalates. The solution is to bring together in-process collaboration for operations, engineering, procurement, contractors and equipment suppliers to a harmonized Master Data Governance to all perspectives of the same data yield the same truth. 

Managing assets requires organizations to be compliant with a significant number of different regulations that have very real implications to operations. Getting the right (trained, informed with the right tools, and qualified), people to interact with assets safely is clearly critical.  Having the records to prove that every action and interaction is audit-able is vital as organizations look to reduce the risk of litigation. Do they hold records of training and certification? Furthermore have the correct guidelines been made available to the individual? Was the right part used when the pump was fixed, was the procedure followed when the equipment was restarted and the structured and unstructured content captured the business value captured. 

Renewables Leading the Growth in the next 10 years

It is really interesting when you begin to connect the dots. For example the ‘International Energy Outlook 2011’ ‒ published here by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) ‒ said renewable energy sources were the fastest growing sources of electricity generation globally. It predicted that from 2008 to 2035, world renewable energy use for electricity generation would grow an average of 3.1%pa, and the renewable share of world electricity generation would increase from 19% in 2008 to 23% in 2030. http://www.esi-africa.com/node/13590 and other dots from the The African Development Bank General Procurement Notices GPN's would clearly agree. Leads one to believe more readily.

XBRL for business. Consider the following from Business Intelligence Blog...Everyone of us know that barcode shows data about the object to which it attaches. This optical machine-readable representation of data, has done wonders for various industry verticals right from production distribution, supply chain, retail, healthcare, etc. right from 1974 when the very first scanning of the now ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode was on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is all set to do similar wonders for business reporting. In Business Reporting Supply Chain, collaboration of data is the key whether its business operations, internal or external financial reporting and regulatory reporting. XBRL is a open global standard, freely available for exchanging business information....XBRL is all set to revolutionize business reporting through electronic communication of business and financial data.

Soon via the use of mobile apps your ebill will contain only the code which will allow the content to be secured at source.

source: http://blog.maia-intelligence.com/2011/05/09/xbrl-a-barcode-for-business-reporting/

Cloud Computing Impact Evidance

In the past months I have had the opportunity to participate in public seminars, meet with leaders, loads of young entrepreneurs, and see much of the same as in the assessment posted by Jim Shepherd of Gartner.

Cloud-Based ERP May Be Approaching the Tipping Point from - First thing Monday morning news letter First Thing Monday

"One of the other things I noticed at the NetSuite conference was that the average age of the attendees was about 10 or 15 years younger than the people I see at SAP or Oracle user events. Most of them had business roles, but they were very knowledgeable about technology, and came armed with the usual assortment of mobile devices to stay in constant communication with both their work and personal lives. Having grown up with the Internet, their general view seemed to be that applications in the cloud were completely logical, and they had none of the usual concerns about security, data privacy, reliability or integration .... As I think about the pace of today's business environment and listen to the attitudes of the people who will be making application decisions in the next few years, I'm convinced that we're finally at the point where cloud-based applications may begin to rapidly take market share from on-premises applications".