Synergos

Síguenos en LinkedIn

The corporate road to a future that has already arrived

By: Fernando Mato

The great corporate successes have always come hand in hand with vision, “out of the box” talent and innovation. Three concepts that move in corporate non-linearity – in disruption – but that undoubtedly lead to the podium of business success and market leadership. Many corporations, however, have traditionally opted for linear models that give them a sense of control over uncertainty. Thus, a large part of the business ecosystems have been evolving in their offer of products and services – the “what” – and in the incorporation of technology – the “with what” – but less in the strategy – the “how” and less still in innovation – the “where to”.

“In today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.” —

Jeff Bezos, CEO and President, Amazon

From this perspective, when we speak, for example, of Digital Transformation, a large part of the productive sector adopts said process from the conception of technological improvement focused exclusively on the “with what”, thus limiting the potential of innovation that falls mainly on the “how” and the “where to”. This conception, although legitimate from the business strategy, nevertheless places corporations at serious risk of continuity in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution; a new era that has not only arrived, but also represents the greatest transformation that the productive sector has known throughout its history. And the path to it is called, precisely, Digital Transformation.

“Every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next few years. What is coming at us is bigger than the original internet, and you need to understand it, get on board with it, and figure out how to transform your business.” —

 Tim O’Reilly, Founder & CEO of O’Reilly Media

As can be deduced from an analysis of the results recently published by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, the countries that lead the ranking of digital competitiveness do so by pointing not only towards technology, but also towards knowledge and development capacity. From this analysis we can also extract the complete absence of Latin America in this scenario of digital competitiveness and the reasons that lead to it. In a growing trajectory of market globalization, however, this absence is worrying for the leadership of the region and its corporations. At this point, the main underlying question is what to do to reverse the situation?

The first thing is to understand in depth the Digital Transformation process, which has given rise to a real Tower of Babel. Although this process is linked to a technological change that is currently evolving exponentially, its figurehead lies in an agile ugrading of corporate know-how.

In this sense, the Latin American labor market must bet on a great absentee: talent “out of the box”; and this is not measured from the competencies based on certifications focused on specific hard skills, punctual and of predictable expiration. It is measured on the demonstrated ability to generate new knowledge and its application to business processes from a high level of background in hard skills, strategic vision, critical thinking and disruptive innovation.

Thus, this profound process of transformation is determined by the development capacity of corporations in the framework of the Fourth Industrial Revolution from the metrics of adaptability and integration, and their agility in the process, strongly prioritizing the urgency of the transition towards the important.

Technology in this scenario is then the means for this change, but not the end in itself; an environment to which corporations need to adapt from now on, dynamically and continuously, through this upgrading of know-how that directs strategic capital investment and technological innovation from the dynamics of change in technological and regulatory frameworks.

It is, therefore, not only about an intelligent appropriation of the relevant technological tools for the future development of companies, but also about an agile management of the transformation process within the corporate ecosystem, from an ugrading of operational, strategic and communication. All this catalyzed from agile leadership and an effective collaborative relationship.

“The reality is, many digital transformations fail because companies aren’t integrating their business and technology strategies from the start. It’s imperative that CIOs know how to quantify their progress with AI and digitization technologies and understand how to effectively communicate this value to key stakeholders.” —

Chris Bedi, CIO, ServiceNow

In summary, the way to synergistically incorporate technology and the ugrading of know-how lies fundamentally in the following three keys:

1) Integrate the intelligent information extraction capacity – Smart Data – for which Data Science and Artificial Intelligence are its natural ecosystem. The reason is that today information management is required to replace the traditional data analytics strategy of seeking answers to “what happened?” and “why?”, towards a “what is going to happen?” approach. and “how can we make it happen (success) or prevent it from happening (failure)?”

2) Integrate the internal skills of the organization to take advantage of technological capabilities, focusing them on transforming processes, products and services.

3) Integrate the capacity for innovation fueled by effective decision-making – from the two previous keys – and that this becomes the engine of comparative advantage towards market leadership.

At the present time, the tendency of the countries that lead the IMD digital competitiveness ranking is to outsource, in part or in full, the transformation processes involved in these three keys. The reason is the marked shortage of professionals and specialists trained in Data Science and AI to be absorbed by companies, and of “out of the box” profiles that handle both fronts.

As a final conclusion, although the Digital Transformation is possibly the most complex challenge faced by the productive sector throughout its history, the Fourth Industrial Revolution opens a path of important opportunities for the growth of corporations and the leadership of markets. And the time is now, because that future has already arrived.

Sources and revised material: