Savannah Group, in partnership with PA Consulting Group, recently hosted a breakfast briefing on digital disruption and strategy, welcoming CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, HRDs and their senior colleagues to our venue in London, overlooking the Thames.
The highlight of the event was a presentation given by Professor Venkat Venkatraman of Boston University Questrom School of Business, one of the world’s leading researchers and commentators on digital transformation.
Professor Venkat’s presentation was both engaging and thought-provoking, focusing on the ideas and concepts presented in his acclaimed book The Digital Matrix.
His presentation looked at how digital technologies are impacting businesses, and what businesses that are being affected can do to keep up with the pace of technological development.
The key takeaways from the presentation were:
- If you want to survive and thrive over the next three, five and ten years, you need to consider yourself a technology company first and foremost.
- Digital giants (like Amazon, Facebook and Google) define the “new rules of value creation and capture” during digital business transformation of industries & companies.
- Your Digital business transformation occurs across three phases: (1) Experimentation at the edge, where digital experiments are far removed from the current realities; (2) Collision at the core, when digital rules challenge traditional industry practices; (3) Reinvention at the root, where digital solutions are delivered in ecosystems across multiple industry boundaries.
- Business leaders need to embrace technological change and be prepared to challenge traditional ways of thinking and acting.
- A key question for senior leaders is: how do you preserve the current business while creating the future business?
- Every industry is on a fast track to digital reinvention. Leadership in this age is connecting the dots of experiments at the edge to articulate likely futures.
- The digitisation journey is about business reinvention. Leaders need to stop looking at digital technologies and start looking at business problems solved by digital technologies at scale and speed.
- To win at digital transformation you need to (1) Orchestrate and participating across ecosystems, (2) Collaborate to co-create capabilities, (3) Amplifying human talent with powerful machines
We have also put together a more detailed write up which expands on each of the key takeaways above and includes slides from Professor Venkat’s presentation.
The presentation concluded with the launch of the National Digital Benchmark survey – a survey that aims to measure the state of digital transformation in the UK, and will become a key tool for businesses keen to progress its digital agenda when engaging the rest of the C-Suite. If you have a few moments to spare, we invite you to fill out the survey here.
