Is Digital Transformation Real?

Strategy/Innovation Director William Oellerman

Strategy/Innovation Director William Oellerman

SHOW NOTES

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BEING DIGITAL by Nicholas Negroponte

 

SOUND DESIGN

Eric Hanes

Some Bits Sourced from Nine Inch Nails Ghosts 1 1 and Ghosts 1 6 under authority of Creative Commons

Outro Sourced from Y-LUK-O's Zuse

Samples from:
EISFABIK's Maschinen
and
Y-LUK-O's Gefahrenfrau
and
GARY NUMAN's I Am Dirt


 

 

For manyyears companies have been keenly focused on driving revenue and continually improving their established value streams to stay relevant. Companies used to be around for decades with little impact from technology and a steep ramp up cycle that protected them from competitors. Over the last few years the rapid advancement of technology has turned everything on its head. Companies can become irrelevant over night and startups pop up every day that challenge companies that are still moving slow and are held back by old tech and old strategies. This new digital world is creating disruption through out industries everyday.

So, what does Digital Transformation mean? A quick search on Google will return plenty of articles containing the terms digital transformation or some version of it. But, are we all defining it the same way? I have found that while the term is quite popular and companies have even allocated resources to transformation or disruption, each company I talk to has a different definition of what they mean and often within the same company or team there is disagreement.
 
Is it digital transformation a strategy? Is it only relevant to startups? Does it apply to an industry or a vertical? Is it a new name for enterprise improvement? Is it about enabling innovation? Is it adopting new technology? Is it all these things?

But, are these the questions we should be asking? Are we asking the right questions? Would it be more accurate to ask if digital transformation is real? Or is this just semantics at this point?

I sit down with Strategy and Innovation Director William Oellerman and talk about what Digital Transformation means and how that applies to so many things around us.