Doing Digital , livre ebook

Doing Digital
Doing Digital
The Guide to Digital for Leaders
Ved Sen
Doing Digital: The Guide to Digital for Leaders
Copyright © Business Expert Press, LLC, 2023.
Cover design by Pablo Conde Llopis
Interior design by Exeter Premedia Services Private Ltd., Chennai, India
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations, not to exceed 400 words, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2022 by
Business Expert Press, LLC
222 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017
www.businessexpertpress.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-63742-409-4 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-63742-410-0 (e-book)
Business Expert Press Collaborative Intelligence Collection
First edition: 2022
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Description
Every business is a technology business, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that every business is a digital business. Whether you work in a large corporation or a small firm, you probably work in a business that’s going digital. If anything, the past two years of the pandemic have accelerated our path to digital, with remote work and ecommerce pushing us all into digital modes of working and living. And yet, if you’re not a technologist, or if technology and jargon seems opaque to you, you might find it daunting to figure it all out. If you understand business but feel that you don’t understand digital and technology well enough, then you’re the person I wrote the book for.
If you’re a business leader, in a large or small business, you will increasingly find yourself making decisions that need to straddle design, technology, and data, related to your organization, and understand the regulatory aspects of digital trends. You will need to constantly update your view of the world, and use this to refresh your strategy and roadmap more frequently than you’ve done in the past. This book will help you as well.
Digital means many things to many people. Is it technology? Data? Design? Is it about mobiles? Big data? Agile methods? AI? Often, the answer depends on who you ask, but in reality, it’s all of these things. This book will arm you with a conceptual framework with which to understand digital. This will help you understand digital transformation in your business better, but it will also help you make more sense of your next small digital project. It will also give you a simple and robust execution framework (connect, quantify, optimize) to help understand digital cycles.
Along the way, I hope it will demystify a lot of jargon—why APIs are like Lego, or what exponential strategies are about. It is designed to give you a good starting point for your journey in understanding all the many facets of digital. I’ve written this book to be a jumping-off point for all these topics. This book should give you enough of an understanding and confidence to go looking for more information on the subjects that attract you.
This is not a text book. It’s meant to be an easy read. It doesn’t assume that you will read the chapters sequentially. Feel free to jump to any topic that’s been bothering you.
This is not a book for technologists, it will not dive deep into technology. This is also not a book about digital strategy—there are plenty of good ones out there. This is a guide to digital for managers, because doing digital is no longer an option. I hope it’s fun to read, it’s been fun to write.
Keywords
digital; Web; mobile; Web 2.0; Web 3.0; Semantic Web; IoT; XaaS; design thinking; service design; cyber security; containerization; API; voice interfaces; big data; analytics; decision making; knowledge management; data architectures; data science; AI; networks; machine learning; deep learning; ethics; agile; fail fast; sprint; scrum; target operating model; data ethics; graph database; exponential change; discontinuity; networks; disruption; servitization; culture; automation; productivity; robots; connected health; predictive health care; electronic patient records; identity; context; trust; customer experience; future of work; scale-free networks; omnichannel; attention deficiency; transformation; optimization; blockchain
Contents
List of Figures
Disclaimer
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1 What Is Digital
Chapter 1 Defining Digital
Part 2 Connect
Chapter 2 The Web—Still Fundamental
Chapter 3 The Social Interface—Media and Marketplace
Chapter 4 Mobile—The Remote Control for Your World
Chapter 5 The Internet of Things
Chapter 6 DiPhy or Phygital?
Chapter 7 The Human Interface
Chapter 8 Why Is Good Design So Difficult?
Chapter 9 What Is Service Design, and Why Is It Suddenly Sexy?
Chapter 10 Digital Infrastructure: Cloud
Chapter 11 Digital Infrastructure: Middleware and API
Chapter 12 Digital Security
Part 3 Quantify
Chapter 13 Welcome to the Data Jungle
Chapter 14 Data in the Enterprise
Chapter 15 Data Architectures
Chapter 16 Data Evolution
Part 4 Optimize
Chapter 17 The Cruel World
Chapter 18 Disruption and the Business Model
Chapter 19 Artificial Intelligence: The Next Era
Chapter 20 Networks—We Live Inside Them
Chapter 21 Making Agile Work for the Rest of Us
Chapter 22 The Transformation Agenda
Part 5 Connect, Quantify, Optimize
Chapter 23 Connect Quantify Optimize—The Model
Chapter 24 Optimizing Health Care
Chapter 25 Optimizing Customer Experience
Chapter 26 Optimizing the Workplace
Part 6 Summary and Conclusion
Notes
References
Suggested Reference Books
About the Author
Index
List of Figures
Figure 2.1 Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, an overview
Figure 9.1 London Tube Map, 1931, by Harry Beck
Figure 12.1 A sample of high-profile cyberattacks throughout the year 2021
Figure 12.2 A sample of high-profile cyberattacks over the past decade
Figure 14.1 Cholera/sewage map—John Snow
Figure 17.1 Exponential graphs
Figure 17.2 The Tesla approach to disruptive innovation
Figure 17.3 The Amazon approach to disruptive innovation
Figure 19.1 The journey to AI
Disclaimer
All the ideas and frameworks in this book are based on my own observations, and do not necessarily reflect the thinking of my employers, unless specifically called out.
Acknowledgments
My life has been full of fortuitous twists and turns executed with little or no planning. Many of these have led to serendipitous meetings and experiences with amazing people who have changed the course of my thinking with just a conversation. And then there are the many, many friends and family members whose minds I have selfishly explored over many discussions and debates. It is to all these friends, colleagues, and passing acquaintances that I owe a big debt of gratitude for a lifelong evolution of my thinking.
Specifically, I’d like to thank Pradeep Kar for pulling me into the world of technology, and Satish Sukumar who is responsible for some of my earliest conceptual clarity about the Internet and technology.
Kannan R and Shefaly Yogendra deserve their share of blame for this book—it was that conversation of December 2015 that drove me to writing it. Madhu Jalan and Rachel Nolan took time to give me useful feedback, but many, many spared the time to read the book and share their thoughts. Pablo Conde designed the cover. All of you are very special.
To my parents, Kirit and Gopa Sen, and my sister Pragna, who would have been disappointed if I didn’t write a book. And to my wife, Karuna Kapoor who takes care of a million things, and inspires me to write.
And to my daughter Maya who is growing up in this digital world and who treats every miracle as mundane.
Introduction
Why This Book?
Everybody has an interpretation of digital business. And much like the blind men and the elephant, we tend to define digital from our perspectives—data enthusiasts will suggest that digital is all about data. Designers will argue that it is in fact about user experience and emotional connects. Technologists of all faiths will put forward their own flavor of digital technology—AI, sensors, or agile development. There are no shortages of catchy acronyms either. SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) was a very commonly used phrase. Yet, SMAC represents as partial a view as any of the others. I felt that a more complete definition was required, which would embrace all aspects of digital, and yet be short enough to suffice as a definition rather than a description. That was the starting point of my thinking about this book. This led to the creation of a conceptual framework, which hangs off the definition, which I hope will be truly useful for people to deal with the multifaceted nature of digital evolution.
But while a conceptual framework is useful for understanding digital, it may not be as apt in helping people actually do digital projects. We need a simple execution framework to follow from the conceptual one, which can be used while thinking of doing a digital project. This is the connect, quantify, optimize framework, which the title refers to, and what the book drives toward. I hope that the book will therefore help readers to both understand and deliver digital projects, change and transformation in the smallest to the largest projects.
Who Is This Book For?
The book is aimed at the business user. It does not assume any prior knowledge of technology, software development, or familiarity with any technical jargon. However, it does assume that the reader is engaged in commercial activity already and is exposed to the Web, mobile apps, and has experienced the need to understand digital, whether as a part of a large organization or as an entrepreneur or even a freelancer. No part of this book tries to explain business concepts. It assumes a basic appreciation of the needs of any business, such as competitive strategy, marketing, cost control, and business processes.
While writing the book, I also read an