Digital (R)evolution

Chapter 1Drivers of Change

Executive Summary: The world is changing rapidly and organizations need to adapt to survive. Transformation is an essential and inevitable process of business evolution, requiring hard decisions about the allocation of limited resources. Assembling the right team of people is primary to success; the technology is secondary.

Thanks to Clayton Christensen, we're all familiar with the concept of disruption. In his classic bestseller, The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen describes the fate of major companies that don't foresee the impact of disruption on their business models.

The disrupted companies were not run by fools. For the most part, their executives were intelligent, skilled, and experienced business leaders. With the luxury of 20-20 hindsight, it's easy for us to shake our heads and wonder why they missed the signals that foretold their demise.

We cannot change the past. But we can influence the future. My advice to everyone reading this book is to dust off your copy of The Innovator's Dilemma and read it again. This time, ask yourself if your organization is a likely target for disruption.

Here's a quick pass-fail test to determine if your organization is a candidate for disruption:

• Have you digitized all of your business processes?
• Are you collecting data from all your business processes?
• Are you analyzing the data you collect?
• Are you optimizing your processes based on insights generated by your analysis of the data?

If you answered “no” ...