It’s Just Business

They used to be ‘mobile phones’… not just phones.

I even remem­ber when it used to be ‘col­or TV’. Now it’s just TV. In fact, now we have to explic­it­ly call out the ‘old thing’ — refer­ring to black-and-white TV — to tell our kids what TV was like when we were kids.

Every­one has already sound­ed off on this, but a small, meta point — why is it a ‘tech’ sto­ry, and not, say retail or some oth­er sec­tion? Price gouger… with a web­site. pic.twitter.com/qyKogFremu

— Bene­dict Evans (@benedictevans) March 16, 2020

You should fol­low Bene­dict. He states things sim­ply and clear­ly.

The indus­try keeps talk­ing about ‘dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion’ and ‘dig­i­tal busi­ness’ but in nei­ther case is the word ‘dig­i­tal’ the mean­ing­ful word.

It’s just trans­for­ma­tion, because it’s just busi­ness.

The rea­son that’s a hard piv­ot is because not every­one knows how to think about the tech­nol­o­gy in such a way that it fades to the back­ground.

Tech­nol­o­gy is still this thing that the spe­cial­ists know.

It reminds me of a con­ver­sa­tion I had with Con­ti­nen­tal Air­lines about 15 years ago. I had a prob­lem with a tick­et. When I called for help, the moment I said “I’m on your web­site, and…” they cut me off and trans­ferred me to tech sup­port (where they could­n’t help me because the prob­lem was with my tick­et, not their web­site).

I still can’t under­stand why it was­n’t obvi­ous that the way the air­line exe­cut­ed against their var­i­ous dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels should­n’t have changed how I got help for a tick­et.

It’s obvi­ous­ly hard to retrain peo­ple, so maybe this is a gen­er­a­tional change. As soon as enough dig­i­tal natives enter the work­force we’ll have enough peo­ple who don’t think of tech­nol­o­gy as some­thing sep­a­rate from the busi­ness.

Until then, I think the best thing to do is involved peo­ple who can apply tech­nol­o­gy to the busi­ness dis­cus­sion as ear­ly in the process as pos­si­ble. In this way you’re infus­ing your busi­ness with the pos­si­bil­i­ties that tech­nol­o­gy enables, instead of think­ing of it as a tool that you apply once the strat­e­gy is decid­ed.

I’ll be writ­ing more on this idea of iden­ti­fy­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties as a way to cre­ate great expe­ri­ences, I’ve writ­ten a great piece about wealth man­age­ment that you’ll see on Axway’s blog soon.

In the mean­time, if your com­pa­ny wants to cat­alyze the poten­tial locked up in your “sys­tems” check out the Axway Cat­a­lysts and drop us a line.

Adden­dum 4/22/2020

The CEO of Box agrees. It looks like the virus is help­ing peo­ple real­ize that just adding some dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ties is not actu­al­ly dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

Many enter­pris­es saw dig­i­tal as an adjunct to their tra­di­tion­al cus­tomer expe­ri­ences or busi­ness process­es. Going for­ward, dig­i­tal will become the core, and any­thing tra­di­tion­al will be lay­ered on top.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) April 22, 2020