How can you ride the digitsation tidal wave in a post covid world?

Covid-19 has accelerated the digitisation of business activities. Ranging from the simple remote working through to virtual collaboration, what was a scientific vision of the future is part of daily life. There is no doubt that march of digitisation will accelerate in the post Covid-19 world and we all need to get ready. I have distilled some ideas to help leaders and individuals think about the opportunity ahead and how they might get ready.

1. Start by understanding the 3 laws of of digitisation so you can understand the inevitability of the future change:
   
   https://rashikparmar.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/be-digital-or-be-digitalised/
   https://rashikparmar.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/are-there-some-fundamental-laws-for-digitisation/
   
2. The heart of digitisation is to create magical client experiences that remove uncertainty. This should be sufficient to encourage someone to want to invest their monies on the the new experiences.
   https://rashikparmar.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/is-the-removal-of-uncertainty-at-the-heart-of-the-digital-economy/
   
3. Digitisation places unexpected challenges to the underlying business models that enable the profitability of organisations and systems. Five generic business models patterns have been identified and can be summarised as:
   1. Manufacturers will augment their products with sensors, connectivity and intelligence to create new client experiences that enable new value
   2. Services organisations will codify their manual activities in to software and deliver them as APIs in the cloud and drive increased productivity
   3. Multi-organisational processes will be optimised through trusted data sources from  platforms such as blockchain and eliminate inefficiency.
   4. Data market places will emerge and will provide an opportunity for you to turn the data you use to run your business into a tradable asset.
   5. Digital representation of physical assets (digital twin) will allow new interaction patterns and new value (e.g. Uber, Air B&B)
      
      These five pattern are detailed in the HBR article I co-authored: https://hbr.org/2014/01/the-new-patterns-of-innovation
      
4. Underpinning these new business model patterns is the opportunity for create new business value around three categories:
   • Increasing the productivity of employees
   • Accelerating processes to improve performance
   • Using the new data and AI to boost predictability 
     
     These are elaborated in the following blog: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2016/03/01/3-business-outcomes-you-can-expect-from-adopting-hybrid-cloud/
5. Leaders need to consider the role they want to play in the growing digital economy as a provider, consumer, complementor of digital platforms – I will be writing more blogs about this in the future. The chapter I wrote in “Case Studies in Service Innovation” titled “Information Technology Enabled Business Platforms” provides some early thinking, but this has moved on and future articles/Blogs will provide more detail.
   
6. Success will depend on the digital technologies that support and sustain your business. The recent survey of 100 CTOs across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) provides a valuable framework to review your technology capabilities.
   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/architecture-decision-points-30-rashik-parmar/
   
7. You need the right skills and culture in place to be able to seize the opportunity. A data savvy culture is one of the biggest changes that is often overlooked and based on the analysis of 30 digitisation projects 5 core competencies were identified. Experience so far suggest that missing any of this core competencies results to failed projects. So review your digitisation projects to ensure you have a healthy mix of these skills
   
   https://rashikparmar.wordpress.com/2016/09/15/what-is-a-data-savvy-culture/
   
8. Whilst all that sounds exciting and daunting at the same time, how do you stay motivated and focused? In addition to having a clear purpose and vision you also need a business case. This is a very high level case of the opportunity for digitisation and provides a basis for you to identify the specific opportunity for you
   
   https://rashikparmar.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/is-there-a-business-case-for-the-next-generation-of-digitisation/

This change like all before will create winners and loosers. I hope this blog provides some clues to help you be a winner. Please do share your perspectives and help improve these ideas.