How Digital Transformation Separates The Average From The Exceptional

After the year that we experienced in 2020, ‘predicting’ anything about the future should probably come with a large disclaimer. 2020 separated the leaders from those just paying lip service to trendy terms like agile, flexible, digital transformation, pivot as well as the ‘new normal’.

Last year was indeed tough however the optimists among us realised early on that the COVID-19 pandemic – as well as associated lockdowns – should be viewed as the ultimate opportunity to accelerate a company’s digital transformation.

Increasingly, a digital strategy is becoming the only strategy that is worth having in a business. The impact of the coronavirus has also influenced just about every single one of our expectations around what is digitally possible, with our recent learnings prompting us to think very differently about our strategic planning for 2021 and beyond. And it’s very exciting.

The Drivers Of Digital Transformation: Three Exponential Laws

In the last few decades, digital technology has progressed exponentially, disrupting lives globally in previously unimaginable ways. And there are three laws, all exponential in mathematical-nature, that explain this progress and rapid growth.

Moore’s Law Or The Law Of Processing Power

This law says that every 18 months, our computers will have twice as much power to process information. We are able to achieve this by increasing the number of transistors in chips, change the way we design chips from 2D to 3D, change the material we use to make chips from silicone to graphite, or move towards using quantum computing.

Butter’s Law Or The Law Of Communication

This law states that the amount of data communicated through a single optical fibre doubles every nine months. There’s a variant of this law for other sorts of communication media, whether it be a wireline like ADSL, VDSL or wireless such as 3G, LTE and more recently, 5G.

Kryder’s Law Or The Law Of Storage

This law states that the amount of data stored per centimetre square of a hard drive will double every 13 months. The trend has recently slowed down to double every 16 or 17 months but remains faster than Moore’s law.

How Digital Transformation Works

At many businesses, the debate regarding whether to pursue a digital transformation strategy has ended in favour of great change. Now a new C-suite discussion is taking place: the best way of making digital transformation happen before it’s too late. Time is running out..

Throwing money at the problem of digital transformation isn’t likely to help as some digital initiatives generate attractive returns while others don’t. This means that companies need to target their efforts and investments carefully which calls for CEOs to make tough decisions about how to change their organisations. It also calls for them to lead the process of transformation while other C-suite executives manage day-to-day efforts.

In practice, this means overhauling how the business works in order to create a new operating model that runs on digital technologies and capabilities. Modernising IT is one particularly critical, and oftentimes misunderstood part of digital transformation because it enables enterprises to accelerate innovation and performance improvement.

Other essential transformation tasks include building a digital culture and developing capabilities that allow for deeper integration with both internal and external systems.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you are trying to get your head around the necessity of digital transformation then you need to do our Digital Transformation Course. For more information, please follow this link.