2018: An Extraordinary Year Filled with Fear of Disruption by Technology and Chaos in Washington

The year 2018 has already earned its place in history books yet to be written with certainty. We have witnessed noticeable cracks in the rock solid multinational alliances, built on common convictions and survived for decades irrespective of the political ideologies. An exponential level of dysfunction in Washington which has been at its peak with constant revolving door for cabinet members and other officials. Social media is effectively used to shame, bully, make national security decisions and fire political appointees like never before!. The sanctity of the most admired elected office in the world has been erased and is filled with lies, media circus and propaganda to satisfy the relentless self admiration like a little child!!

The stock market has been a roller coaster and gave almost everything back from the beginning of the year. Fear of a trade war seems to be realistic. If it happens, It is almost certain that, it is going to be a dangerous game with no winners, but just all losers!

The world macroeconomic system is a very complex multivariable mathematic model. It is extremely hard to sustain an equilibrium and positive trend while navigating through the counter balancing and conflicting agendas of sovereign nations. Governing and navigating this, is indeed much complicated compared to running a small business. A little sense of humility to recognize the complexity of this system is the first logical step. But having access to every intellectuals and experts in the world is useless, if listening is not a basic habit!

We have witnessed investor's wealth being wiped out significantly by failure of one of the most admired American business icon, General Electric. Looking under the hood shows a history of many business practices between various business units and financing arm, which are boarder line with ethical and legal, which allowed the cancer to grow from inside and finally reached the threshold to push it over the cliff.

What happened to the Digital Industrial GE which was the darling and benchmark of digital transformation for pundits? Well, it has again proven that Digital Transformation or any Transformation has to create better Experience, Efficiency and Value for the stakeholders in a sustainable manner. Any other game played with hype and repositioning messages will only buy a short term run which will eventually collapse.

Another Digital Transformation didn't pan out is Verizon. Earlier this year Verizon has written down their investment around AOL and Yahoo and has acknowledged the failed strategy. But in this case, Verizon showed the courage to acknowledge the bad news and instead of just repackaging digital from the existing business units like GE and declaring victory to market, they Just made a run at and failed, and decided to move on with its great telecom business.

Taxi industry has been devastated by UBER, LYFT and the likes around the world and is embracing protectionist tactics in many cities/countries to survive. Auto industry in general is under the constant threat of disruption with fear of eventual elimination of the Powertrain, once the crown jewel of every auto company. After falling off from cliff once and was saved by government bail out, GM is getting prepared for being nimble and right size for the future as a smaller General Motors car company unlike the good old club of BIG 3. Like a lot of other auto companies, GM is also making meaningful bets with cruise automation to deal with the potential self driving disruption in the future transportation and mobility.

On the digital side, we started the year 2018 with a lot of hope and fascination shared by hype pundits around Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The word "Cloud" is almost required in every marketing materials created in 2018!. Personal data mishandling has been becoming more serious problems for major social media and data companies and Washington may be getting ready to have its own version of GDPR in the coming years!

After a significant amount of the hype cycle, blockchain is being used for some very specific use cases and is just evolving like any other technology tool or platform. Adoption of cloud has been growing significantly, but suddenly many IT leaders are recognizing the negative financial impact of blind lift and shift cloud strategy. Every software company in the world wants to have Software as a Service (SASS) as their commercial model to have the annuity payments, which their investors love!. But IT leaders in corporate world are starting to recognize the risk of constant price increase and dependency, which can become a significant challenge for an already expensive function of Information Technology(IT/Digital). According to many public data sets, the global IT spend is approximately 3.8 Trillion USD world wide in 2018 and a noticeable portion of these are used for hype cycle experiments which usually do not create any sustainable better Experience, Efficiency or Value.

Let us take a simple examples of the major hype which we all deal with every day: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics. All these have been there for decades and it is true that Machine Learning(ML) has gone through some exponential increase in capabilities because of the exponential improvements in computing including GPU computing and Deep Learning Algorithms.

Some of you may have come across engagements where organizations hire companies to apply Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning and saw them using excel to clean up the data for Machine learning!. if the data preparation step can be done with excel, this is a classical example of a technology hype exercise looking for a problem!

Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning, Machine Learning or Predictive Analytics can be used for decision making in a dependable and sustainable manner if the data is collected by sensors/machines and is therefore consistent and at scale.

For example, using the opportunity/leads data in the CRM software as the foundation data set for Machine Learning would be another classical example of technology looking for a problem, unless all those leads and opportunities are created by machines based on some sensors at scale (for most businesses, these are the most inconsistent data typed in by front line sales people).

Unfortunately digitization at scale are still far from reality in enterprises. While some organizations are recognizing the need to do this with sustainability in mind, almost all organizations struggle with the pace. Managing the risk of doing an inflight engineering without any disruption needs precision execution with high automation.

Always ask this simple questions when you deal with the umpteen digital transformation proposals.

(1) Will it create a better experience(E)?

(2) Will it create better efficiency(E)?

(3) Will it create any monetizable value(V)?

If any of these three (EEV) can be achieved in a sustainable manner, It is worth exploring.

If it delivers better experience and efficiency(E&E), It can indeed create value for the organization.

If it create V(monetizable value) along with E&E, then it is the true Digitization of your business.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect any opinions or views of any organizations or businesses the author is associated with currently or in the past.