Beyond Digital Transformation for a Changing World

Lot of really big companies that in particular monopoly in the market in the past, very easy to fall, in the accelerated way due to huge overhead and if new revenue streaming no more come in sustainable manner. Investors (including financial institutions) will eventually stop injecting more resources inside money losing business, and once it happens, the business empire regardless of size, will fall and become breaking news. No long ago with have a century long travel and air business in UK just fall as well. If you read the news and observe closely, traditional business is falling at the fast speed. You will be surprised to find out that, they are affordable for all kind of technology initiative and most likely they are invested in them either.

Most of the business owner or investor for most of the business empire, either no brother for the changes, or thought anything can be buying off, include catching up with business trends. If competitor A invested is product X, so did we. Most of the people, including those very successful businessperson is understanding digital transformation (DT) in the fundamental wrong way. It not just about applying enterprise IT or modernize them, it all about how to make use of modern enterprise IT to complete revamp existing business model, to make it able to serve modern customers better, faster and collect their data and build up consumer and buyer profile and predict what the additional items you can carry and best to offer for them that likely to be buying too (to help up sell and cross sell or takeover competitor customer over). It does not surprise we see a lot of “cross industry or cross sector” digital transformation (DT) business case. One of it is how Apple invent “iphone” smartphone, “ipad” tablet, “iwatch” and complete changing the market in the past. It interesting to see how the current camera manufacturers acting in the camera business and how they will or any one of them transform the business.

Instead of focusing on keep catching up with what other is doing, it makes more strategic business impact by knowing where the world is going first. If you do not see the future, and just keep fire fighting for the current, you end up will be out-of-the-business too. Digital Transformation bring in automation, where digital and online or virtual replace physical presence is just one part of it. For a big company used to pursue more open banking branches than competitors, it is hard for them to dramatically shift toward online banking or mobile banking first mentality. Under the shift in the strategy, it needs to go hand in hand by massive re-deployment of excessive manpower  into strategic business area or re-skilling them for what the company wants them to do. Last minutes telling your employee for voluntary separation scheme (VSS) or massive layoffs is not the way either. But if necessary to be doing after explore all the business option, companies need to do what needs to be done, and get it execute at the speed of light. Else, company is making massive lose before you reacting, it makes the suffer for both end.

We can see for more big company merging and take-over, as a way to consolidate operating cost, with the upfront financial sense for doing so. But that always forgot one fundamental question, after consolidated and remove out unnecessary business, and downsizing the workforce, what business we are in now and future. Most companies just try to repeat what they did in the past, hope the same successful formula will work in the future. That is the dangerous mindset, or maybe just forgot the fundamentals of the business need customer, no just supplier. Once the customer or market change their behavior, market change, so do supplier that can not reacting fast enough will be end up being extinction. World changing in the market consuming information from print media like books and magazine into online, it worth to see for those in the print industry how they reacting to this business world change as well.