Build for Change: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement through Continuous Digital Innovation

Chapter 7You Are Your Software—The Digital Imperative

The first chapter of this book posed a set of questions:

• Is your company prepared for the demographic reality barreling down on you like a runaway train, driven by new digital thinking and technologies?
• Is your company prepared for the Gen D future, or is it heading toward life support?
• Are you ready to make dramatic changes in how you think about customers and customer engagement to ensure the continuity of your business?
• Will you commit to doing everything necessary to keep customers from hating your business and some from possibly trying to kill it?

In the examples from Prudential, American Express, OCBC, and other companies, you have seen bits and pieces, some of them very large, of the changes businesses are making as they prepare for Gen D. The examples illustrate how a fundamental shift in the mind-set about how technology must support business, coupled with the 1080 high-definition customer view made possible by the data-intent-customer process combination, is the start of the path to staying alive.

The companies you have read about are letting the business drive the technology agenda. They are empowering businesspeople in their organizations and repositioning technology to serve customer interests. None of them have completely transformed every aspect of what they do to prepare for the new Gen D world, but they ...