** Published at Business2Community **
The 'Digital Transformation Revolution' traditional narrative of change from papers to bytes or from human-driven labor to computer-driven one, is just the supportive narrative in my view. One that is easier to understand and pitch for.
The main narrative of the revolution, as I see it, is that the digital landscape is changing in a faster pace from what we've been used to. The pace of the change is the revolution and not the change itself.
A nice example is the comparison of the time it took to some technologies, products or applications to reach 50 millions users adoption. For TV it took 22 years, the internet 7 years, Facebook 3 years, and for Pokémon Go only 19 days!
This revolution is not driven from a single event or in any specific point in time, it is constant changes, happening quite rapidly along the timeline, creating mini and micro revolutions all the time.
Mobile, Cloud, Big data, XR, AI, Predictive Analytics and Blockchain, to name a few. All these domains and technologies surround us, sometimes buzzing louder than they should, but eventually they are present, maturing and bringing value to the ones using them.
Since you are a technology vendor, offering products to a competitive market and constantly seeking improvement and increasing your revenue, I see two revolution-readiness measures you need your company to take into consideration - Digital Literacy and Stack Readiness.
In light of my definition of the Digital Transformation Revolution, the focus in each one shouldn't be training or coding for specific technologies available today, but adaptation for technological changes that are yet to come.
Not trivial to do, but that's the true nature of the revolution.
In the past, the crowd that was generating or experiencing the revolution, couldn't necessarily benefit (or suffer...) from the outcome. These days the same generation experiences many revolutions' outcomes.
Your two most valuable assets are your people and your technology. Both of them should be perfectly prepared for this revolution.
First you want your employees and managers to be digitally literate. You want them to be able to understand the new world they are operating in and be able to quickly adapt to changes. Rest assure your customers are doing this already...
How do you do that?
Don't train them (only) on the new technology available today. That won't last long and you won't keep up.
Train them on how they can learn themselves.
Make sure they learn through experience (isn't it better to play around with AR and VR than read about their capabilities?)
Encourage them to constantly read and keep up with the latest update.
Point out fun and exciting content sources (thankfully, the world isn't short with tech bloggers) and adjust your learning platforms.
Then your tech. In a similar way, adding the current solution in a specific tailored way will get you that far. Tomorrow a new feature will come and you stack is turning to a spaghetti-code that only few in your organization can understand and design for. Make it future-proof for what you haven't developed yet, for the change is about to come.
How do you do that?
Basically, build from the ground up, like a building. Deep, stable, wide foundations that can hold any and many floors above.
Working with platforms is always a good idea. It is important to identify the well-established ones that really deliver platform services, on the cloud, at scale, since many products out there call themselves platform, without actually being one. A real platform will grow its services organically, adding new technologies and features, letting your product built upon it and to natively grow with it.
APIs, Micro services, and other atomic building-blocks architecture that make sure you can change, edit and build-upon in a robust, scalable way.
MVP and a suitable business model sounds trivial but essential in this case. Since the pace of change is so rapid, you need to be very agile, attentive to market feedback and with the ability to change quickly as well.
Video is at the front line of the Digital Transformation Revolution, as a medium that is replacing text, not just in its hand-written format but also its digital format.
As an online video expert who has been building B2B online video products and video platforms for years, I can testify from what I've seen and learned and how this notion of the revolution is shaping in some of the companies I am working with.
Tech vendors choose to use video platforms in order to get video workflows into their product-line, without having to deal with this advanced ever-changing technology themselves, and there are also the ones that are using the same video platforms to better support the Digital Literacy of their workforce.
Whether through video technology or through other means, the most important thing is to get your people and code streamlined with the fast pace of the ongoing digital transformation revolution.
