Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business

ConclusionWinning in the New Code Rush

We are living in a special economic time. A generation from now, we will look back and see that the 2010s was the decade in which commerce changed. We’ll see that traditional factors of production and wealth creation—capital, labor, and raw materials—were superseded by digital means of production: SMAC technologies coupled with massive amounts of data. It will be clear that this was the decade in which the digital lives of people, things, and organizations took shape—when the virtual took primacy over the physical. Code Halos are already beginning to create an entirely new economy, full of opportunities of unprecedented scale and possibility.

This transition has profound implications for individuals, businesses of all sizes, and public sector organizations:

• At a personal level, all of us will reform how we interact with all kinds of organizations (and each other). We will reset our expectations about what freedoms and protections we will demand from our governments and regulatory agencies. We will work to strike a new balance between what we can gain in this new world—conveniences, enriched experiences, new insights—and what we might lose, such as personal privacy.
• Large corporations will need to move quickly to meet new market expectations. Customers and investors will increasingly place value on digital offerings and capabilities. In capturing the opportunity of wrapping people, products, and processes with digits, many will have to ...