Nine big shifts that will determine your future Business of Technology

Developing technologies will continue to drive the digital disruption in companies and industries worldwide, pushing the need for transforming the traditional IT model into a wider ‘Business of Technology’ strategy capable of dealing with both the threats as well as the opportunities that will emerge.

In order to master the capabilities that deliver business relevant digital technologies rapidly, successively and at scale, businesses have to take into account nine big shifts that are interdependent and need to be applied in concert. These nine shifts impact the business operating model of the enterprise itself changing the way it identifies, trials, evaluates and scales new digital technologies to make them business relevant.

The nine big shifts framework can be used to obtain insights into causality, to design a future Business of Technology and to plan the transition towards it, including dimensions such as human capital, culture and leadership.

Those nine shifts are:

• Agility and speed: Organisations need to change course in real time based on market realities. In order to do so, they can either be a "fast moving experimenter" or "talent and strategy led
• Innovation and ecosystems: Companies need to develop a portfolio of initiatives as well as create a network of actors with complementary capabilities to collaborate and take joint risks in value creation
• Blurring boundaries: In a tech-driven business environment, IT capabilities will be organised closer to –or even embedded within– the business
• Future workforce: As the Business of Technology develops, existing IT tasks and capabilities will disappear, remaining IT tasks will transform and new IT tasks will emerge, creating not only new jobs but also the need for new skillsets
• Governance and funding: The budget allocated to technology is likely to increase in the next years, especially innovation wise. That may force companies to reduce traditional technology expenses or even look for funds outside the conventional IT budget
• Leadership and culture: Businesses will need to locate and foster digital leaders with distinct set of skills and capabilities: change agents, strong in building relationships and in influencing others to create buy-in and build trust
• Organise for digital: The next wave of digital is rapidly approaching and will be driven by technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, IoT, digital twins and intelligent interfaces
• Organise for data: The shift in data analytics involves looking at real time views into the present and making predictions for the future to create value to the business
• Organise for cloud: For many businesses, there is no value in maintaining servers and datacentres. Adoption of cloud computing combined with automating tasks will change the role and size of the central IT organisation.
  

As companies embark and progress on their digital journey, their focus will shift from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’, reimagining the way they create value.