The Digital Imperative: Untapped potential to retreat from disruption

Disruption in the framework of technology and innovation is described as the change that renders earlier goods, services, and/or procedures inefficient. As a result, the implication is that earlier technology and/or modes of functioning are no longer viable.

Disruption can be caused by a variety of circumstances, with five distinct dimensions to consider:

Cost - new technologies and/or processes make older ones uncompetitive in terms of production costs, as the new ones are so inexpensive that the older ones are no longer economical.

Quality - new technology and/or procedures improve the quality of products or services to the point where they become uncompetitive with older ones.

Regulation – new legislation or regulations, such as environmental or labor protection regulatory requirements intended to improve social conditions, make prior products or services unappealing in comparison to new ones.

Customers – significant changes in consumer or business customer preferences make previous products or services unattractive in comparison to new ones.

Resources - for a number of causes ranging from environmental outages to trade blockades, and demographic issues, previously significant resources are no longer freely available.

We may see signs of drastic transformation all around us:

According to Forbes, in the 1960s, the average life span of an S&P 500 business was over 65 years; now it's closer to 15 years... In the next years, it's expected to get even shorter.

Moore's Law, which describes the rising potential of science and technology, is leading us into some strange territory: self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, and machines talking to other machines, to name a few. We're creating new business models using systems and procedures that didn't exist only a few years ago. To characterize these dramatic, tech-driven shifts, new terminology like "attention economy" and "collaborative economy" have developed.

The old hierarchical chain's power dynamic has changed from manufacturers to intermediaries—and now to buyers—as a result of technological advancements. Companies who have best capitalized on this value chain transformation have been rewarded by investors. Consider Google, which has a market capitalization of $384 billion, or Facebook, which has a market capitalization of $228 billion. Or, more recently, the ride-sharing business Uber, which is valued at around $40 billion, or the consumer travel site TripAdvisor, which is valued at around $12 billion.

The Need of the Hour

As Watts S. Humphrey famously put it, "any firm is a software business," and as a result, the long-accepted, customary course of business is prone to alter dramatically and radically, if not today, then in the not-too-distant future. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, you may either be the disruptor or the disrupted.

Leaders must have the courage to urge their organizations to innovate and to embrace, rather than resist, change. The opposite sides to the story are digital transformation and digital disruption. Technological and market factors drive firms to adapt in new, often unpredictable ways, thus they are closely linked. The digital disruption of one company is the digital disruption of the competitors. Clients will have additional choices in the end, and if your rival offers more appealing solutions, those customers may be attracted away.

One interesting opportunity lies in the Public Sector or the Government adapting to technology. In a continually altering environment, public sector institutions play a key role in supporting their residents by balancing the scales. Disruption creates opportunity, for example, technological disruption. Internet of Things (IoT) advances, Big data, predictive AI and much more which aid in the expansion of the public sector. Disruptive innovation provides policymakers with a potentially strong instrument to get more profits for less by breaking apparently immovable trade-offs: a method to lower costs by up to 75 percent in some cases while maintaining or increasing services. In order to remain relevant and to continue the progress of various public sector units it is essential that such organizations adapt to the technological disruptions or else they may perish.

Companies are increasingly altering how they use their data assets and improving internal procedures in order to acquire greater customer information. The key strategies adopted by companies in this scenario include-

No Code Solutions – The future of Software development is no code, low code solution. It provides drag-and-drop tools that enable businesses to develop software quickly with little or no coding. Businesses can claim power back and use these services to practice rapid application development with customized workflows and functionality. Many of these solutions are geared toward enterprise-sized businesses that need to quickly design business processes and workflow applications at a large scale.

Data Analysis- Researchers utilize search data analysis to reduce data to a story and interpret it in order to derive insights. It makes sense that the data analysis process aids in the reduction of a huge chunk of data into smaller bits which can then be used by the brands to analyze their target audience perceptions and brand’s growth.

Salesforce: Salesforce is a cloud computing solution that provides on-demand CRM to customers all over the world. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a paradigm for managing customer and prospect contacts with a business, such as phone conversations, emails, conferences, and social media thereby helping the companies tab their growth and analyze the target audience. 

Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is a type of internet-based distributed computing that allows a program or application to operate on multiple computers at the same time. It is categorized as follows: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Software as a service (SaaS) is a type of service that offers various advantages to its users, therefore benefitting the brands in long term.

The above tech advancements are the key to a brand’s success and with the ever-evolving landscape of technology it important that companies adapt to these technologies for developing a strong understanding of their product perceptions and consumer behaviors which will enable the brand to grow in an upward trajectory.

The article has been written by Suman Akula, Founder and CEO, StackNexus Inc