Rewired

Chapter 5Build capabilities for now and the next decade

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

—Abraham Lincoln

What you have defined on your digital and AI roadmap will necessarily be focused on the next two to three years. But you are also building the enterprise capabilities that will make it possible for your company to digitally innovate for the next 10 or more years.

This long-term view to building capabilities, in fact, is what differentiates the digital leaders from those who are looking for a quick fix by going after a sprinkling of use cases. Developing the necessary enterprise capabilities requires a plan and real investments that will serve the immediate needs of the priority domains but also the longer-term needs of the organization as it pursues more digital and AI innovations.

This starts with developing a shared viewpoint of the current state of digital capabilities to understand what is immediately possible and what will be needed to realize the long-term vision. Do you have the software engineering skills required? Can your operating model scale to hundreds of pods? Is your critical data easy to consume?

Once organizations have a shared fact base about where they are from a capability perspective, they are better able to make realistic plans about what is possible over what period of time.

Assessing foundational digital capabilities

There are four core capabilities required to deliver digital solutions: talent, operating ...