We’ve been talking about paperless, and paperless offices, for years. These paperless were no more that an initiative of the businesses. Businesses would choose to go paperless as an innovation strategy, to increase productivity. It would happen from within.

Digital Transformation is not a strategy, is a mandatory stage in the evolutionary process.

It goes beyond businesses choices.

The world is changing amazingly quickly. The number of mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, wearables, increases by the second. These tools, which give us so much power as users, can only mean our structures and systems are about to go through a major change. Change will come inevitably.

When buying a plane ticket, we don’t call a travel agency. And, in the same we don’t call a travel agency, we also do not demand a paper invoice after the purchase. Something as simple as the purchase of a ticket just got reinvented. So, what can we say about really complex things? Digital Transformation will change the way people interact with businesses, the way businesses interact with one another, and the nature of businesses itself. And it will even challenge the existence of many businesses.

Studies show, in a really assertive manner, that many businesses will vanish rapidly whereas this profound change in processes and systems make them unable to add value to the new world. All of this in a short period of time. What is the point of a banking agent, when we are more than capable of using all of the bank services in a smartphone? Will the millennials go to a banking agent to open an account? The relationships between people and businesses are de-materialize. The new ways of doing things represent the end of many businesses dedicated to being a trade intermediary.

The beginning of the Technological Revolution?

If, until now, we were a part of changes that waited for us to catch up before taking off, the Digital Transformation will always be one step ahead of us.
The processing power is increasing exponentially, the number of information sources is really close to endless. The mere leap from one stage of evolution to the next allow us to do the formerly unthinkable. Today, we could take men to the moon only with a smartphone processor. ‘Tomorrow’, we could inject ourselves with a grain-sized ‘phone’, why not?
An IBM CEO once said that just five computers would be enough for the entire world market. Digital Equipment founder claimed it didn’t make sense for people to a home computer. If, in the technology beginnings, people believed stuff like that, it’s only fair to assume we are only stepping on the ladder of Technological Evolution. I mean, that can be so far from the truth. When will we start smiling thinking about the intercontinental communications made of transatlantic cables?

2016’s Avalanche effect

Digital Disruption doesn’t ask to come in the businesses, and finds them unprepared and unwilling. We are looking straight to the breaking of everything we take for granted today. It is impossible to imagine what is coming towards us. We have to be ready and be as disruptive as Disruption itself, or we can be consumed in our fixedness. The biggest ability we can have right now is adaptability.

Businesses, however, are the entities more resistant to change. Individuals tend to be more flexible and agile, but when it comes to businesses they have structures more solid than it is even recommended. The end of businesses can be understood by their failure to adapt. Businesses need to reorganize, adapt themselves and their internal ecosystem to the new normal, which is constant change. They need to develop habits of learning, unlearning and relearning. They need to develop organization resilience skills.

Taxi drivers all over the world lived in a monopoly, not flourishing business, but at least a stable one. They had few direct competitors. All of the sudden, here comes a player that doesn’t fit any previous idea of competition – Uber. Today, it seems as natural to us as the need to get around itself. But, in the comfortable taxi drivers’ sits, Disruption hit hard and unpredictably.

The Disruption of the new world (the new normal) comes almost always from an uncomfortable place. Taxi drivers were as far from the need to innovate as Uber was far from losing anything.

Today we manage information in accordance to certain business processes. But these processes will all change, and fast. The management of this ‘new information’ is a colossal task, and is going to shape the Global Customer Experience.
According to Gartner, ‘by 2016, 70% of successful digital business models will rely on deliberately unstable processes designed to shift as customer needs shift.’

Agility, in the middle of the avalanche, is going to allow us to survive.

 

 

 

 

 

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