Digital Transformation is real and is here. McKinsey & Co. has some excellent survey results on digital trends. Incredibly good insights.
Exhibit 4 shows how the investment stacks up for digital initiatives.
Not surprising that Big Data came in last. In and of it self it’s too nebulous to be a stand out. But Big Data is an essential ingredient to winning in each of the other mentioned categories.
Take Digital innovation of products and business model: Every upstart disrupting an established industry – Uber, AirBnB, you name it, is doing so by out competing incumbents with data first – data about the buyer and data about the seller. And then coding their way to world domination.
Or how about Digital engagement of employees, suppliers and partners. The single most critical missing ingredient in a successful engagement platform is holistic identity. Take employee identity example: By triangulating HR and performance data with social and process graphs from business applications, new insights emerge about who is good at what. Critical if you are to truly transform how you, your customers and partners engage. Data and real-time analytics is at the heart of this.
Digital Customer life-cycle management: If the foundational element of meaningful lifecycle management isn’t about data such purchase history, purchase intent and preferences, then what is it about?
Similar to Social Software, Big Data is not a thing or a initiative or a project. The real time applicability and analysis of Big Data is what ensures not just speed of execution but also quality of outcomes and directional accuracy. And whilst we go on and on about why big data is important to established enterprises, some incredible examples of applications and network-first businesses are emerging, thriving and even disrupting.
Big Data has often come off as a solution looking for a problem to solve. My personal opinion is that in the enterprise context, its the tiny insights are far more interesting. Perhaps this hard research showing a lower investment priority is Big Data’s big branding wake up call.
McKinsey’s excellent report is about Digital Transformation. Well, Digital Transformation is a non-starter if you can’t get a handle on the applicability of what we’ve come to accept as Big Data.