Digital Value Creation

A few months ago I had an episode about the 3 questions CEOs should ask. Why do anything, Why Now and Why You?  Some clients and friends used that approach for months and here is what they learned from it

Is your digital team energized or deflated? If they were in a competition, do you think your team would win? Do they show up unstoppable and ready to conquer? Oh, yeah. We are here to talk about the softer side of value creation.
Having seen a lot of transformation teams in my career, I can often predict how the team will perform based on how they show up every day and in every meeting.

I obviously love digital transformation and clearly believe that AI, automation and machine learning will help create amazing digital businesses. However way too often I see companies solve the wrong problem with the right tools and the right problem with the wrong tools.
Here's what I mean...

2020 turned out to be the year with massive adoption of digital transformation. Some companies used AI and automation strategically to transform their business models, while others used bots and machine learning to deal with business disruption. Some companies had great tangible value creation as a result of their digital projects and others are not sure about the value.

How can we make sure that every digital project delivers measurable value?

We're slowly settling into the new year. Businesses started their new fiscal years, operating on new budgets. And all the assumptions and learnings from the pandemic show up in very different ways in their digital transformation plans. While there are a lot of challenges in many industries, 2/3rd of the companies seem to be as well or better off than before the crisis.

I think the adage in 2020 is that years of digital transformations get done in WEEKS. Every day I notice massive new innovations moving to the mainstream. Here are some recent highlights. 
- Digital Currency in China
- AI Language Processing with GPT-3
- More Driverless Cars
- MIT report of future of work
- IMF report of future jobs
and more.

As we're looking ahead to 2021 there are strong trends emerging in the world of digital. I looked at the global impact of AI on labor markets during the pandemic and also at surveys reading the minds of Boards and CFOs as they set the digital goals of companies. In this second edition of "looking ahead", I will be discussing the longer-term shifts of digital investments and how to prepare for them.

This is budgeting time for most companies. Budgeting like no other. Budgeting without a safety net. As companies compare their original plans for 2020 with the results, they realize that something fundamentally needs to change about planning ahead. What assumptions can we make about technology investments and returns? How far ahead can we realistically plan? What should we change?

It is all too easy to assume that everyone has the same assumptions as we do. So, I spent a long weekend looking through over 50 recent digital research reports and surveys on what companies are doing in the crisis and how they plan to move forward. Some I expected and others surprised me. Here are the highlights:

Most companies claim that the pandemic accelerated their digital projects. Others say that digital projects were the only that have not been put on hold. As we’ll learn it’s a lot more complicated than that. Some digital programs are going faster and others are sidelined. Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.