In essence, to bring about the necessary transformation government, industry and other organisations will need to operate far more horizontally, be far more truly customer/people focussed. And in order to compete with the organisations that have been successful in creating digital productivity they often need to look at ways to remove 50%, or even more, from their current business costs. Complex problems will require complex solutions that cross the traditional specialisations we have built up in the form of government departments, business departments and specialised silo-based structures based on highly developed and very sophisticated expertise in agriculture, energy, healthcare, communication, media, manufacturing, finance, and so on.
Open ICT infrastructure (broadband, smart grids, data centres, cloud computing, M2M, smartphones) is the glue that is needed in these transformational processes, which will lead to more horizontal collaborative structures within both individual organisations and broader economic and social structures.
The ICT industry, therefore, is in the driver’s seat of the transformation and it should therefore take a leadership role. Many leading ICT organisations are already showing thought leadership – IBM, Accenture, Cisco, Intel are some examples. Furthermore, some organisations have used the opportunity left open to them by traditional companies and organisations unwilling to transform themselves (or incapable of doing so) to use ICT in a disruptive way to bypass these old industry models and create new business opportunities for themselves. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and also many smaller e-companies operating in retail, media, communications and energy, are creating havoc among the traditional players in their markets.
There will be more of these disruptive developments as many industries and sectors are extremely slow to change. The healthcare and energy sector are earmarked as key target markets simply because of their sheer economic size, globally worth trillions of dollars each.
In all of these new business breakthroughs, apart from leadership and vision, ICT has been the deciding differentiator.