WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Download Shopify’s Future of Commerce report for sound predictions from commerce leaders and business forecasts that will impact 2022 and beyond.

Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs), digital humans and physics-informed AI join the 25 technology profiles on the Gartner emerging technologies hype cycle for 2021.

Emerging Technology Roadmap benchmark adoption plan, risk factors, and value drivers. Use this roadmap to help you make technology investment decisions for the coming 12- to 24-month time period.

McKinsey Global Survey on technology and the business suggests that even in the crisis’s earlier days,1 respondents were reporting progress on their integration of technology and business—and that these efforts were creating tangible business value across four measures, including new revenue streams and lower costs. The results also suggest that, on average, some transformation activities result in more impact than others (namely, those related to talent and capabilities). And according to the data, the companies with top-performing IT organizations have differentiated themselves from others in their efforts to create value, adopt new technologies, and bring technology and business closer together. More specifically, the results point to seven key lessons about technology transformations.

I have been talking with hundreds of people across the industry and have discovered that the changes coming to Apple are deeper than just a VR/AR headset. Way deeper. The changes already being worked into products represent tens of billions of dollars of investment.

TL;DR: In today’s post — the first in a series exploring the future of human-computer interaction (HCI) — we’ll begin to unpack the 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to do it.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

At the top of most organizations' priority lists right now is how to keep their workers productive and engaged. Except for in-person businesses and essential workers, the workforce has largely been physically disbanded until the pandemic comes to an end, one way or another. In unprecedented fashion, technology has suddenly become one of the single…

Responses to a McKinsey global survey of 800 executives suggest a disruptive period of workplace changes lies ahead due to acceleration of automation, digitization, and other trends.

The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.

Organizations should first consider how the behind-the-scenes logistics of their “Full Service 2.0” offering will be best facilitated by advances in technology. Ride-sharing services could provide a chauffeur-like experience by modifying their algorithms to allow a user to request trips with the same driver instead of the first available car. Hotels may accelerate the introduction of robots to handle room deliveries or other in-room services in a socially distant manner. Technology gives organizations new options to address the previously high costs of high-touch, full-service models or the uncertainties around service and delivery times that turned away consumers from these services.

Which technology trends are most likely to impact your business in the coming years? Trends are waypoints to help anticipate future states in a world where uncertainty looms. The Future Today Institute's annual Tech Trends Report asks you to examine your assumptions, cherished beliefs and expectations for the future using a bolder, more holistic perspective. In the 13th edition of our Tech Trends Report, we forecast the key technology trends that will redefine businesses in the coming years. More importantly, we offer strategic analysis and guidance on those trends and further explore them in future scenarios to help you understand their implications on your organization and industry.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work, and relate to one another. It is a new chapter in human development, enabled by technology advances that are commensurate with those of the first, second and third industrial revolutions, and which are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that create both promise and peril. The speed, breadth, and depth of this revolution is forcing us to rethink how countries should develop, how organizations create value, and even what it means to be human. Now, as the world grapples with COVID-19, there is an opportunity to further harness the power of the revolution in ways that create a more inclusive, human-centred global economy.

The MarTech marketplaces that RSG covers continue to evolve rapidly and have become more complex (with more overlaps!) this year. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) market is no different - with new vendors, more investment, emerging niches, and evolving use cases.

The retail industry is rewriting the laws of physics. Change is coming at an ever faster rate each year and 2030 will be upon us before we know it. Explore the world in 2030 and the future of retail 2030.  

Here are all the slides, plus analysis from Recode.

Fortune summary: tech firms are focusing on privacy; more people are using images to communicate; Twitter and Amazon are making small in-roads into the Facebook-Google ad duopoly; 51% of the world's population is now online.

LUMA is the leading investment bank focused on digital media and marketing. We provide strategic advice, proven M&A expertise, and extensive industry knowledge to optimize outcomes for our clients.

We grouped the most common mistakes into four categories: (1) mispricing on one side of the market, (2) failure to develop trust with users and partners, (3) prematurely dismissing the competition, and (4) entering too late.

“We chose right from the very start to not hide the technology,” Hanrahan explained.

Service performance has improved recently for most CPG companies. But getting goods from plant to shelf involves more hurdles and more complexity than ever before.

Digital transformation is a long game. At the same time, it has to start somewhere. Over the years, the biggest digital transformation priority for companies has continued to be the customer experience. That work is aimed at fixing and modernizing the customer journey. Once this happens, digital transformation tackles more sweeping efforts that involve multiple groups. This is why the organizations who are further along the six stages of digital transformation develop customer-centered roadmaps and then divide and conquer against those initiatives across the enterprise.

Digital transformation was initially intended to modernize technological infrastructure, migrating costly, dated, and complicated hardware and software solutions to more agile and scalable cloud and mobile platforms. But since the early days of digital transformation, the speed of technology innovation has only increased. Now the digital in digital transformation has to keep up with all relevant technology trends as they represent disruptive threats and competitive opportunities. This is likely a key driver of 2018’s dramatic rise of substantial digital transformation budgets.

Tech Trends 2019: Emerging technology trends can seem both elusive and ephemeral, but some become integral to business and IT strategies—and form the backbone of tomorrow’s technology innovation. The eight chapters of Tech Trends 2019 look to guide CIOs through today’s most promising trends, with an eye toward innovation and growth and a spotlight on emerging trends that may well offer new avenues for pursuing strategic ambitions.