Roman Empire is
revving up. A 15th century
Latin word is shaking up the world of Business in the 21st Century.
If
God gave one wish, today’s CEO might ask for her business to go “Digital” ASAP.
Once used to only count one’s fingers and
toes, the word “Digital” took responsibility to represent aspirations many big
ideas over the past 600 years. This one
word “Digital” has consistently caught the world’s imagination in many unimaginable
ways.
The past 100 years witnessed the word
“Digital” represent tech and business evolution in photography, cameras, alarm
clocks, watches, radio, modems, electronics, TV, computing, and today’s digital
(social) media. We might recall how this magic word helped an amazing American company called Digital Equipment Corp build its business in the 1960/70s. Today, we are even producing a
new breed of humans - fondly referred to as 'Digital Addicts.'
Fast forward to
TODAY. The 600 years old word “Digital” becomes the biggest Business Idea of this decade. Our world of Business is hit
by the magic in this word once again. The
word “Digital” has taken our world of business by storm. It even disrupted
some businesses like a Tsunami. Every CEO want to take their business Digital and hit that
milestone ASAP. Every Consultant wants business to become
Digital and is keen to convince the CEO that Digital Thinking is a new way of
doing business and not a milestone to hit. How did we get to this point?
While the CEOs and their Consultants try to align with each
other, I got curious about how the ‘movers
and shakers’ of our industry helped
the story line evolve over the
past decade. And set this big business opportunity called
“Digital Thinking” to be a "Win-Win" for every involved stakeholder.
Read the first installment of my history log book here on this blog. You will get to see a more cohesive
story with a lot more reference stops on the timeline in the upcoming installments.
1995: Harvard's course on Digital Thinking, tells how to tap Digital Marketing!
The new age “Digital Thinking” movement gets a leg up, with
the mighty Harvard Business School pushing a course for business executives.
The word ‘Digital’ moves from the IT domain into Business.
Harvard establishes a course covering Digital Marketing
strategies, to use the new trending digital social tools/platforms like
YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter.
Many business execs must have gone through this course. Did they benefit from it?
2010: Millions spent pushing Ads to Social platforms, with doubtful returns!
While companies attempted to market on Digital social
platforms, it took a while and millions of dollars of wasted advertising spends
to realize that their clients prefer to socialize on these platforms than to be
told to buy certain products.
Digital Strategy gets bad mouthed here in favor a Social
Strategy. The authors suggest businesses
to adopt social strategies that help their customers find new friends or
strengthen their relationships. You
scratch my back and I… Advance your
customers interests on these social platforms to advance your interests. The old, practical and sagely advice gets
packaged here.
2012: We are talking about Digitalization now!.
It is all about use of word ‘digitalization’ at this time. However, directionally set to encourage
businesses to think beyond business process automation to transformation of business
process by exploiting pervasive digital connections between systems, people,
places and things. Mobile phones and
tablets are coming into the conversations.
2013: Digital business strategy comes up, IT-business alignment takes a leap!
This interesting research article in the MIS Quarterly
probably gives the most realistic definition - suggesting that Digital business
strategy is different from traditional IT strategy in the sense that it is much
more than a cross-functional strategy, and it transcends traditional functional
areas (such as marketing, procurement, logistics, operations, or others) and
various IT-enabled business processes (such as order management, customer
service, and others).
2014:
The influential consultant is talking about digitization. All that is suggested here is: How
and why to hook up a high-speed IT Team to work alongside the regular IT Team
and focus on web and CRM.
Gartner brings up the topic of eBusiness being different
from Digital Business. Blurring the gaps
between the physical and digital worlds of business, managing the presence of
things - connected and intelligent, and integrating these things with people roles
and business processes brings in the digital flavor.
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