Businesses make the wrong choices when they focus only on digital strategy.
This was the word from Simon Dingle, technology editor at Finweek magazine, speaking at the Sage Evolution End User Day, in Johannesburg, yesterday.
"When businesses fixate on just the digital part of what they want to achieve, they start measuring the wrong things. They start forgetting that digital is only there to make your business better - it's one of many things you need to do to run a business in the 21st century," he said.
Drawing a distinction between "technology" - which can include primitive hand axes - and "digital technology", he explained that the ubiquity of digital tech makes it an absolutely vital part of every business, but that it must be integrated into other business functions and used to support the business, rather than be seen as a separate entity that must be dealt with on its own.
"Oxygen is everywhere, and if you don't know how to breathe it, then you die; you don't need a strategy. Digital is the same - it's part of how the world works now. You do it or you die," he said. "You need to think about your business strategy, not just your digital strategy."
Part of what makes strategists concerned about digital technology is the incredibly rapid pace of development, Dingle claimed. "One of the things that makes this kind of technology different from the sticks and stones we've been shaping for tens of thousands of years, is that the sticks and stones kept pace with our evolution. Digital technology turns the whole equation on its head. It progresses faster than our evolution as a species, and that poses some problems for us."
Whereas pre-digital technology changed incrementally, with each change making a small improvement over the previous iteration, digital technology changes exponentially, Dingle explained. "Moore's Law was an observation made in the 60s about how quickly we were managing to increase the processing power of computers. It basically says that computers get twice as fast, or half the price, every two years."
It's not only processing power that changes so quickly. "The interesting thing is that we've learned that it not only applies to processors, but really to every bit of digital technology we have, whether it's screen resolution, fibre networks or storage. Digital technology leaps ahead in great bounds - it's not incremental; it's exponential. It doesn't get a little bit better every two years; it gets twice as good."
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