If you want to get your head around what Blockchain can mean for your business, what do you do? Go and read about it online, maybe talk to your tech team? Or sign up with a service provider to play, test, even break some basic services?
It’s actually this latter approach that is the key. You need to live and breathe what you’re doing.
You can’t just read about it: you have to actually experience it. And the evolving DevOps culture not only facilitates this, but it is also teaching us that fail fast is the quickest, most effective way to innovate.
Testing, falling down and starting all over again is an integral part of the language of the agile business.
Using technology uninhibited – without fearing failure – is the only way to understand how it works and therefore what its potential could be within your organisation.
The most important thing here is that this isn’t just the role of the IT team.
Every department, team and function has to “get digital” in order to create an innovation culture – and it needs to be driven from the top.
This is why digital diversity is an essential quality to have on any board, helping to develop a company-wide culture that values curiosity, questioning, learning and disruption of the status quo.
A digitally diverse board should include the more traditional, established C-suite who have business, operational, and financial know-know, as well as the younger generation of digital natives, who more naturally see the world through a digital lens.
Being digital at the core delivers competitive advantage beyond better services for consumers and increased revenues – it also gives your organisation the ability to attract the best talent.
Realising your company’s digital transformation doesn’t mean abandoning legacy infrastructure. Unless you’re a startup, it’s unlikely you can build your infrastructure from scratch.
On the other hand, rip and replace isn’t an option budget-wise for any but the biggest spenders, and, more importantly, it isn’t a wise option.
In the scrabble to get digital, we’re seeing FTSE 100 companies throw money at the problem, with estimates that enterprises spent $3.5 million on average in 2018 on cloud apps, platforms and services.
But this expenditure isn’t necessarily being made with a deep understanding of the technology or what it can do for their businesses.
Technology is changing quickly. It is the companies that learn to adapt the infrastructures they already have that will thrive, not the ones that tear down and rebuild every time a new wave of technology surfaces.
Making investments that count requires complementing existing infrastructures with emerging technologies – whether that’s AI to improve customer service or data analysis tools for personalised experiences.
We’ve already identified that new service-based models allow rapid testing of new solutions, backing up a fail-fast, fail-often culture without massive spend or complete infrastructure overhaul.
The real challenge in the evolving digital landscape will be systems integration: understanding how to make emerging technology work efficiently with traditional infrastructure.
3) IDG’s 2018 Cloud Computing Research