Today’s new technologies are the fundamental building blocks of business. In order to unlock their full potential, you have to take the right perspective. The future company has to bring something new that will change the perception and allow creating a digital culture geared for continuous adaptation. A change must be part of an organisation’s DNA, empowering one part of your business that is hard-wired for evolution, your people.
Machines are joining the workforce, working with people and creating new products and services, as well as bringing complementary skills that will make them trusted co-workers. The workforce will become more fluid, embracing a shape-shifting skillset that is highly technology savvy. By doing so, the companies can be prepared to tackle unpredictable challenges. People are using technology platforms in order to create new ecosystems.
This revolution is driving businesses towards entirely new growth strategies . Digital disruption is no longer a surprise. With full awareness of these disruptions ahead, you can evolve to meet the challenge.
To that aim, the future companies have to create a corporate culture based on four core values:
- Data driven: data becomes so pervasive and readily available that it supports insight-driven decision-making everywhere;
- Built for change: changing how you’re built to develop new skills, new processes, new products and whole new ways of working. Your people accept change, enterprise-wide;
- Embrace disruption: an inspirational vision of how technology enables different processes, so the business can play a lead role in forming and coordinating existing and future ecosystems;
- Digital trust awareness: technology change creates new risks, but you can’t reverse-engineer security, privacy and digital ethics around a technology. Instead, they must be integral to development from the outset.
This vision brings us again to think how a human with one’s adaptability and creativity is still the engine of this transformation. Organisations that remain in the market will be those that have been able to enhance its human capital. People who work for these companies will be more and more prepared and ready to meet the needs that today we cannot even imagine.
Where to begin?
We must have a clear roadmap, where the objectives of an organisation are well defined and meet the needs of its customers. In addition, it should be stated that these needs change over time, for both external and internal factors of an organisation, and therefore, we must be open to change.
However, one person’s clear vision is not enough to ensure its implementation.
As digital becomes critical to business success, we cannot continue to rely on outside contractors; relying on them when building our digital services only perpetuates periodic project thinking.
Continuous improvements of our digital services means that we will need an in-house digital team capable of doing a lot more than the occasional maintenance. They need time to think strategically, develop new services and keep their skills up-to-date.
These changes inevitably lead to the creation of new professions and ways to relate them to the current organisations.
Thus, we have increasingly productive companies that are well connected to us. For example, our refrigerator will tell us when we have to buy milk; when we need to eat; our car will wake us up to let us know it is time to change the route because there’s an accident and we can arrive late to a meeting with the boss. We could go on for hours giving examples of how the digital revolution has changed our daily lives.
If, as a manager, I have a very clear direction and trajectory to follow, as a citizen and a user of all these services, I am a little scared of the alienation, which is behind the door.
As it has happened with the emergence of the email technology, which has replaced a fax machine, the question is, will we become slaves to these new inventions/developments or will we be free to manage our activities being next to our families and friends?