Personal Case Experience

Digital Strategies & digitalization

Already at the end of the 90s, corporations began to heavily invest in the "electrification" of their value chains. Starting with an initial focus on the customer sales side, the "ecommerce" quickly evolved into "ebusiness" which then encompassed all relevant functions, and which reached out to streamlining interactions with the key suppliers. "eMarketplaces" popped up in dozens and started to disrupt the business models in many different industries: by cutting out middle-men ("dis-intermediation") and often sharing a part of the resulting cost advantages with their customers in order to drive their nonlinear growth.

I had been with SIEMENS telecommunications, in charge of managing the global business tranformation initiative for what was at the time SIEMENS´s biggest division. And I was positively surprised by the courage of the central board of SIEMENS to massively invest - actually over 1 Billion Euros! - in the launch one of the biggest global ebusiness initiatives of the time, which started with the set-up of an own "Center of eExcellence" in the year 2000. Today we would refer to it as a "Digital Unit".

Through my own digital venture, which I launched at the time with a former senior manager from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), I had the chance to gather a very different, international experience and substantial field practice in how to support best the digitalization of knowledge-intensive business processes and what cultural (change) factors are critical in order to ensure effective implementation.

Today, about 17 - 20 years later, after decades of continuous work done by many companies in the area, the phenomenon has re-gained significant new momentum: No industry and no company can escape anymore from the "Digitalization" wave. It seems to be omnipresent. Technology has undergone substantial progress, including amazing new levels of of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, which suddenly allow a very different quality of (big-)data analyses than before. As a result, we are actually facing a fundamental disruption in business which will separate the data-driven, fast-paced digital enterprises from the slow-movers in the years to come. In every industry.

Over the years I adopted a structuring model that helped to guide the discussions with customers and business partners, to simplify and address the complexity involved in any Digitalization effort. I would like to share that again here with you: