Where do you fit in the new digital ecosystem?

Over the last 30 years, in a constantly shifting environment, TMT companies have struggled to gain solid ground, aiming to ride the trends of digital evolution and navigate the resulting disruption. Better understanding the underlying trends is key—as is comprehending the digital ecosystem as a whole.

So much is changing, so fast, in technology, media, and telecom (TMT) that it can be hard to grasp. From almost any vantage point, it’s increasingly difficult to understand your place in a network that is rapidly growing both larger and more complex, and to clearly identify the sources of value creation today, much less tomorrow.

And it’s not hard to find examples of TMT companies—and even entire sectors—damaged by a failure to understand and adapt to a changing industry landscape. Smartphone companies disrupted prominent mobile handset makers, which are still struggling to catch up. Many established enterprise software providers, late in adapting to cloud-based models, lost significant market share to software-as-a-service firms.

So this article aims to demystify the trends shaping what we call the digital ecosystem, to show the trends’ direction and how they intersect; we look at what’s behind today’s value shifts and offer a structured way to view these trends. In presenting a new framework—based on analysis of ecosystem companies over 30 years and interviews with TMT strategists—our goal is to help you anticipate and leverage the trends with the goals of competing successfully and staying relevant.