Leading Digital Equals Data-driven Design, Development, Delivery, and Delight

No doubt you remember Toy Story 1. It was 1995, when Buzz Lightyear made many fans think deep with his hubris-laden “To Infinity and Beyond!” That catchphrase reflected the zeitgeist very well, especially the digital one. Unchartered tech territory was explored in popular books by Nick Negroponte and Bill Gates, respectively Being Digital and The Road Ahead, while Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was warning of “Irrational Exuberance.”

From there, organizations were treated on better-than-ever IT parties: e-commerce, e-business, web services, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, grid/Mobile/Cloud/wearable computing, smart this-and-that, Big Data, Cyber-Physical Systems, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things/Everything just to name a few.

Now, let’s fast forward to 2015. Today, Leading Digital, more than ever, is the business-way to go, but IT has become surrounded by this bad aura of irrational religiousness. Many business executives are allergic to smart and intelligent technology pitches, as I tried to point out in my last TechCrunch article. Instead, Digital Transformation should be presented along with credible and intelligible down-to-earth storylines. For instance, Big Data and Analytics should be an organization’s Practical Yoke, not a costly burden.

Back in 1995, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema defined The Discipline of Market Leaders around the grand concepts of Product Leadership, Operational Excellence, and Customer Intimacy, from which organizations were expected to choose. In 2015, there is no choice; you have to do all three and keep weaving them creatively through your business. Digitally, that is!

Now, if I cut all the crap, my bottom line pitch would be something like this five-dimensional Leading Digital clover, where all the basic business constituents mutually reinforce one another. It’s a map to make clear that Being and Leading Digital is about profitably integrating the five D-dimensions of Data-driven Design, Development, Delivery, and Delight.

Central to this pitch and to any business is the art of offering fine value and servicing any customer with DATA, i.e. by Doing All Things Analytically: the clover’s stem. That’s what I call Simple, Intelligible, and Credible: SIC! From here you are allowed to dive deeper, for instance with the help of our surgeon’s scalpel called TechnoVision.

 

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