Digital Business Is Big Business
“Digital business transformation.” If you haven’t heard the phrase much, get ready, because it’s what Gartner, IDG, Forrester, the press, vendors and consultants of all shapes and sizes will be talking about for the next couple of years. DBT will displace bimodal IT, cloudification and DevOps as the hot buzz term, right up there with software-defined-everything.
More importantly, it’s going to be pivotal for those who sell and manage channel tech services.
I’m normally pretty curmudgeonly about the tech industry term du jour. I’m particularly leery of ones that use words like “transformation.” Transformation implies really big changes. Big like caterpillar into a butterfly — that’s a transformation. Me dropping five pounds, getting a haircut and a new suit — that’s not. So when you talk about business transformation in that light, the results had better be darn impressive. And honestly, that had me skeptical about DBT until I saw one particular definition.
Most explanations for DBT own up to the challenge implied by the concept of transformation. They use words like “universal,” “holistic,” “all-encompassing” and “profound,” then employ lists to drive home the point. Here’s a sentence from one particularly bad description: “The development of new competencies revolves around the capacities to be more agile, people-oriented, innovative, connected, aligned and efficient with present and future shifts in mind.”
Seriously? Insert eye roll here. You had me at competencies.
The definition that resonates with me came from a Cisco slide deck that talked about digital transformations in the oil and gas industry, and I don’t think the author meant it to be a universal definition. But it is. It says that digital transformation in oil and gas means:
Aligning information technology strategy with operational technology strategy.
Let that sink in for a minute. I’ll wait. And as it penetrates, I hope you’ll see that this very simple definition is extremely powerful and universal. In fact, I’d say it’s something of an E=MC2 moment. Before Einstein’s equation, scientists knew that stars were destroying matter to create energy, but they had no idea of the relationship. Einstein gave it to them, and the realization that the relationship was constant, and that the constant multiplier was a very, very big number, implied atomic energy resulting in much bigger bangs than most physicists had previously imagined.
How big of a bang happens when a company’s IT and operational technology strategies are aligned? In oil and gas, it means that every deep-water rig exchanges more than a terabyte of information per day with onshore offices. It means that every valve on every pipeline is producing data about its own state and condition. That’s the stuff you’d expect. But it also means a much better ability to coordinate the flow of natural resources and do things like monitor vibrations of systems, or measure their power consumption as they do their normal jobs. When the normal job produces abnormal vibrations or power consumption, it probably means some motor somewhere is about to seize up, or worse, a weld joint is beginning to fail.
The bottom line is, it means the difference between being reactive and being proactive, and that’s the incredibly important transformation. It’s critical that IT be involved here, because customers will be even more proactive when they can analyze data from sources across the business.
Space here doesn’t permit me to work through extensive examples, but you can do it yourself. Oil and gas is huge and complex, but every small business has opportunities. Think of all the operational equipment in a bakery or a restaurant, or a small manufacturer, or a laundry delivery service. Think of instrumenting it all so that performance can be measured. If you can help that customer predict failure, or optimize performance, or know when a bigger or smaller piece of equipment might be needed for a particular task, you can really affect the bottom line. Businesses whose equipment doesn’t fail don’t disappoint customers.
And operational alignment means more than just putting sensors on the stuff of business — though that’s a huge piece of it. It also means working with technology fiefdoms like marketing, web services, customer support and more to ensure that the technology not only fulfills its operational intent, but that it also reports back to company managers about how that technology is functioning. That data, if used wisely, provides insights to management and customers alike. And customers love that.
The great news for the services channel is that this all services based. It all requires connectivity. It all requires a solid security infrastructure, and it’s all worth doing. IT is central to the whole thing because it’s data analysis that brings much of the benefit of a digital transformation. If you can help align information and operational technology, the result will delight end customers, and your clients will flourish. The next few years are going to be … transformational.
Art Wittmann is vice president in Informa’s Knowledge & Networking division.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/artwittmann
Twitter: @artwittmann
