A digital frame of mind

It is time to get ourselves into a digital frame of mind. The evidence is abundantly clear that most businesses are fundamentally technology-enabled, to the extent that the boundary between the physical world and the digital world is getting quite blurred.

We need to seriously look at technology from a strategic perspective, as something to be managed and controlled like any other competitive weapon employed by the business.

Once we make this insight it is then fairly simple to see the process for viewing technology strategically in context of the various strategic elements of the business; such as money, people, time and customers.

Instead of trying to deal with this technology thing as one big confusing chunk, we can now decompose the problem and consider the role of technology in each of these domains.

It is essential to first decide what your strategy is and then look for the breakthroughs that technology can deliver.

Consider the strategic issues and opportunities in the business and look for the digital idea in that area. Ask how a rethink on the back of technology can dramatically improve decision-making, productivity, cycle time, cost of the process, etc. We are really looking for breakthroughs.

This is possible even within some of the less intuitive domains of the organisation. Let's take by way of example the financing of the business. Let's discard the traditional thinking. Ask yourself what the processes are today and then challenge why they have to look the way they do. Can they function in a fundamentally different way if I took a digital view?

Let's think, for example, of all the participants in the supply chain as potential partners in financing the business. Yes, you are quite correct, you have the idea of a virtually integrated organisation - where I electronically connect all of my suppliers to my organisation and in turn connect all my customers.

Technology can be used to tie together this virtual network, achieving an optimal flow of information and goods, at the right time, to just the right place and for just long enough to be value-added before it goes to the next stage in the process. The result is that each participant in the process now shares the funding burden and your organisation gets access to products and services at the right time and for the right length of time before it passes to the next stage.

Consider the impact digital thinking can have on the organisation's human resources. There is so much going on in recruiting via the Net and in Internet-delivered education. It is a question of strategically assessing the potential breakthroughs that can be achieved in thinking digitally about the challenge of recruiting and developing people. This is a strategic element of huge importance to everyone. Ask the hard questions and don't be constrained by existing mental models. Ask the question "Why not?" before falling back to the usual channels. Look seriously at what elements of the process can be digital and what absolutely has to be physical. (I suspect one will end up with much more in the digital bucket than one might think!)

I am not going to spend much time on the topic of customers when it comes to strategically applying digital thinking to this problem. Vast volumes are currently being written on the topic and many dollars are being spent on getting this right.

The most dramatic impact on business as we know it is resulting from the impact digital thinking is having on the element of time in our businesses. In many ways the timeline of many processes in the organisation was set during the "industrial" era.

In other words, it was invented on the basis of a physical flow of stuff. It was constrained by the time delays of the physical world, such as moving paper documentation in support of the process. An example in the legal world is that of registering a property. The simple act of taking away the physical elements of the process frees us up to bring about not just percentage improvements but quantum change and improvement. Cutting processes from days and weeks to minutes and hours, and actually redefining the way in which "industries" work. It is truly impossible for companies on a traditional industrial clock to compete with companies on digital time.

If we get it right, reinventing ourselves in the digital domain can change the way we do business forever. It can change the way we communicate, recruit people, interact with our customers, manufacture or sell and the manner in which we conduct meetings; in fact every crucial aspect of the organisation.