In order to leave a lasting legacy, business leaders in the integration industry must capitalize on the new opportunities technology is providing their businesses and aim to achieve the nine elements of digital maturity.
This article by Rachel Quetti was first published on Commercial Integrator.
In case you haven’t noticed, technology has been evolving, and continues to evolve, at an increasingly rapid rate. It’s affecting nearly every aspect of your life, including your business.
This evolution of technology from the years 2000-2050 has been coined The Digital Transformation, and according to Scott Klososky, an NSCA industry insider and expert on technology and its impact on business, it will be a historically significant era where business leaders can either capitalize on technology or allow it to take their businesses away from them.
So, what do you need to know in order to ensure your business succeeds throughout The Digital Transformation? Better yet, how do you leave a lasting legacy during such challenging and unpredictable times?
During his NSCA Business & Leadership Conference session entitled The Executive Power Hour: Innovation- Trends, Technology and Taking the Lead, Klososky says business leaders must overcome The Transformation Dilemma.
The graph below demonstrates the dilemma business leaders face as technology transforms exponentially.
According to Klososky and the graph above, organizations change logarithmically while technology changes exponentially, creating a “strategy risk gap.” This is where business leaders can either thrive or fail.
“You live in a complicated market,” Klososky told attendees. “There’s a blessing and a curse in complicated markets. There’s danger and opportunity. If you make missteps in strategy, you feel them right away. The same goes for good decisions. You have to make really good decisions [including] brave bets and investments.”
Business leaders can turn the strategy risk gap into their own lasting legacy if they play their cards right.
So, how can business leaders turn risk into reward? Klososky said they must have digital maturity.
Digital maturity is defined as a measure of the capability and resilience of an organization to strengthen itself using digital technologies, along with having discipline to develop and maintain a high degree of technological fitness required to ensure survival and hopefully, thrive.
Digital maturity starts with understanding the technological changes that are happening now and how they will impact your business.
Klososky said there are three things that are impacting business leaders’ worlds that they need to be aware of to achieve digital maturity:
- The Connection of Everything:“The internet is connecting things that have never been connected before,” said Klososky. Business leaders in the integration industry need to understand the opportunity to develop new solutions that can not only be put on the network, but also have the ability to connect to things that have never been connected to before, providing new and improved data to clients.
- Mobility, Wearables and Implantables: “We’re starting to see the potential with wearables,” said Klososky. He believes wearables will soon enable people to take in two different kinds of data, the data they see in front of them from the real-world and the data that will float in their vision from the wearable device. “There is no doubt we will get to this multiple stream of information,” said Klososky.
- Data/Information Immersion: With smartphones, people get answers instantly, but that’s not even considered impressive anymore. “We’ve gone numb to how much data is flying around us,” Klososky said. Business leaders need to be aware of what kind of data their clients want to collect from different devices and how that data can help improve business.
Klososky also mentioned the emergence of frictionless communication, digitally augmented relationships and robotic and software automation. These new concepts mean that by the end of The Digital Transformation, 35 percent of all human jobs will be replaced by technology. Therefore, business leaders must also understand the concept of humalogy in order to operate their organizations in a way that incorporates human skills and technology to build a lasting legacy and successful business.
Humalogy, Klososky said, is the balance between humanity and technology. “This is a concept you have to understand,” Klososky told attendees. “There’s a lot to be said for human strengths.”
Klososky said businesses must grow out of their old-school operations and ask themselves, “Am I having humans doing things technology should be doing?”
It may seem like a futuristic approach to operating a business, but the world has already witnessed people being replaced by technology on toll roads. This trend will continue, and business leaders need to start thinking about how they will incorporate both human skill and technological capabilities into their operations.
The Nine Dimensions of Digital Maturity
In order to achieve digital maturity and build a lasting legacy in the integration world, business leaders can benefit from understanding the nine dimensions of digital maturity.
- Leadership digital readiness
- Digital workforce assessment
- Transformational Design Capabilities
- Systems of Engagement
- Systems of Record Effectiveness
- Technology Completeness & Leverage
- Data Maturity (DIKW)
- Organizational Risk and Control
- Market Competitive Ranking
Achieving the nine dimensions of digital maturity will certainly take time, but it is imperative that business leaders take a hard look at how they’re running their businesses in The Digital Era and figure out the steps they are going to take to achieve digital maturity.
“If people get good at all of these nine elements, they win. Digital maturity will turn into profit amplification,” said Klososky.
A former CEO of three successful tech startup companies and principal at consulting firm Future Point of View, Scott Klososky specializes in seeing beyond the horizon of how technology is changing the world. His unique perspectives on technology, business culture, and the future allow him to travel the globe as an international speaker, consultant, and author, working with senior execs in organizations ranging from the Fortune 500 to universities, nonprofits, and countless professional associations and coalitions.
