Verizon – Being digital in 2021 and past: Age of Belief
“Be not afraid of greatness,” wrote Shakespeare. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
On this 12 months of the pandemic, a lot the identical may very well be mentioned of digital transformation. There are firms ‘born digital’.
There are some on a deliberate path to turning into digital, and plenty of others have had digital transformation thrust upon them to allow them to proceed working with a distributed workforce.
On this ultimate episode in Verizon’s Age of Belief podcast collection during which InnovationAus writer Corrie McLeod discusses how companies have responded and the way they’ll preserve digital transformation momentum in 2021 and past with Verizon president of World Enterprise, Sowmyanarayan Sampath and regional vice-president, Asia Pacific at Verizon Enterprise Group Robert Le Busque.
Mr Sampath summed up 2020 with one other quote, this one from Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
2020, he mentioned, “feels like weeks when decades have happened as far as digitalisation and digitally enabling companies and enterprises goes.”
Mr Le Busque concurred. “We’ve seen organisations and markets which have been very conventional, very non-digital in the best way that they’ve constructed their enterprise models, quickly accelerating to digital first agendas.
“Digital first decision making has escalated all the way to the board level. And it’s not just in enterprises, it’s also in government.”
Board stage know-how discussions and choices should not new, however Le Busque mentioned these discussions modified basically in 2020.
“Discussions had all been around risk and exposure. Now they’re about opportunity and investment. So, the technology C-suite needs to bring a very different approach to the discussion.”
When an organisation has digital transformation thrust upon it the end result is unlikely to be optimum and Mr Le Busque mentioned organisations ought to now take pause, evaluation their 2020 digital journey, and put together themselves to higher plan the following stage.
“The key for companies across the board will be to take a moment to pause and reflect on what’s happened this year, not only within their organisation, but within their industry, their competitors, their peers, their partners,” he mentioned.
“They need to very deliberately and thoughtfully analyse what they saw that worked, and what was successful, either in their own shop or someone else’s, and then start to craft their strategies going forward based on those observations.”
Mr Sampath mentioned there was some urgency to technique improvement, as a result of 2021 is prone to see a brand new crucial for digital transformation. However not like COVID-19, which demanded a response, this new crucial will represent a chance that organisations can select to disregard, at their peril. That crucial is 5G.
“A lot of people think 5G is 4G, only faster, but it’s not,” Mr Sampath mentioned. “We’ve got new capabilities we call ‘currencies’ with 5G that didn’t exist before and that opens up the innovation framework: latency, built-in security, device density and really low power requirements.”
He mentioned organisations, if they’re to innovate with 5G, should develop functions that make full use of those currencies.
“If you just use one of them, you’re not going to get the full value of 5G. You’ve got to use at least two, preferably three. Then you have a killer application in the making.”
Mr Sampath was not sport to foretell the killer app of 2021, however he cautioned in opposition to merely digitising present processes.
“Going digital shouldn’t be internet enabling your present companies and processes. Digital is all in regards to the expertise. It’s about wanting on the underlying processes and cleansing up these processes in order that it may be digitally enabled.
“Most processes are based on policies that were set in place 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. So as we move to digital, we have to go back and clean up those underlying processes and policies to make them ready to take advantage of what 5G or even what 4G has to offer.”
Dialogue then turned to the talents organisations would require to progress their digital journey. Le Busque recognized three ‘legs’ to abilities necessities: information, privateness and belief.
“When you give all of those a technology focus it brings real clarity to the types of skills you want to be looking for,” he mentioned.
“Those three concepts more than anything else should inform and drive resourcing decisions for organisations, at least in the short to mid-term, as we seek to rebuild the economy and rebuild some of the markets that have been most heavily impacted.”
The Age of Belief podcast collection was produced as a partnership between Verizon Enterprise Group and InnovationAus.
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