08/02/2024
Key Influences on the Digital Core in a Digitally Disruptive World – Part 2
In Part 1 of the Digital Core, we discussed the first four factors affecting the Digital Core, namely considerations for legal and regulation, for customers and expectation management and the availability of skills. In this Part 2, we discuss the interconnectedness and criticality to business over the next decade of the Digital Core and the next four factors affecting it covering Bad Actors, the always-on nature of digital, and implications for supply chain and legacy technologies and process.
Connected Everything
Every aspect of our lives is either now connected or have a path to being connected in a digital way. It is increasingly difficult to be “off-grid” to live as a citizen and perhaps implausible if not impossible to be “off-grid” as a business in today’s digital world. The interconnected nature of this increasingly heterogeneously connected ecosystem of course enables huge potential for convenience and efficiency. It also scales and amplifies some of the challenges and risks, of being so extensively and seamlessly connected as we discuss in the following update.
Bad Actors
Unfortunately, there is a significant and growing threat to our digital, online lives and ways of working posed from a range of ‘bad actors’ seeking to do harm, mis-inform, extort value, and deny access to our digital personas, businesses, and societies alike. The threats range from “lone wolf” individuals, through organised crime, to nation states. As such, beyond just awareness to the threats, we must ensure that we are deploying as much effort and resources into protecting, detecting, responding and in the event of an issue, recovering from the impact of these bad actors. These core capabilities and mindsets are even more important in an AI era, where the new tools and technologies can equally be deployed by the bad actors for harm, as much by well-intentioned organisations and individuals deploying for good.
The always-on, 24×7 world.
Much of society is already reliant on a globally available digital technology infrastructure whether it be mobile phone networks, internet access, cloud compute and the like; this is not a new issue. The more reliant people, businesses, societies, and governments become on digital services, on-demand, and the more intertwined they become to our everyday lives, the more critical the 24×7 (x365) aspects of the environment needs to be. There are many people in many organisations whose lives and work are intrinsically tied up into the deployment, securing, maintaining, and supporting of infrastructures that underpin the “always on” culture, many of us have come to expect. The rapid rise of data needs and the even more rapid rise of AI has only added to the weight of expectations, pressures, and workloads of the same reasonably small number of skilled professionals and leaders who understand, develop and mitigate for all of the opportunities and risks enabled through the now critical, increasingly complex Digital Core.
Supply Chain
Few businesses are islands and most rely on a connected set of partners and suppliers that make up the fulfilment of product or service. As such, increasingly AI has added extra importance to this, not only does each business need to understand, protect and grow its own Digital Core, it needs to understand to a level, the quality of (and perhaps now the contribution of AI to) their partner and supplier’s Digital Cores. A failure or misfire of any element upon which a business is reliant upon, will quickly become an operational, commercial, and potentially reputational issue. Mapping out these supply chains, their security and resilience and now their reliance upon AI will become a task of upmost important for every business.
Legacy
This is not a new consideration. Many businesses, even today, maintain (or not) legacy systems and processes that can slow down or impede progression to high performance of the Digital Core. There are many reasons why legacy persists in an organisation; common reasons will be availability of budget, prioritisation (never quite reaching the top) and resistance to change (from people comfortable with the existing way of doing things). Over time, this legacy can grow into a complex, expensive and high-risk set of issues for a business to manage and remove opportunities to participate in the digital world. Legacy will divert management and professional time, budget, and resources away from innovation, exploration and serving customers and will be an increasing drag on business performance.
If you would like to discuss more about the content of this blog and the issues being introduced, how to become hyperagile, or how to evolve a Digital Core and its implications for your executive team and business please do get in in touch. If. you simply want to contribute your thoughts and experiences to a wider piece of strategic transformational research and development, please get in touch here……