Companies Still Hostile About Digital Disruption Will “Sleepwalk Into Irrelevance”: Didier Bonnet

Companies Still Hostile About Digital Disruption Will “Sleepwalk Into Irrelevance”: Didier Bonnet

Organisations that choose to either not delve into digital and the various technologies available, or even worse, those that are still hostile towards it, have a bleak future and will “sleepwalk into irrelevance” a digital disruption conference has been warned.

Didier Bonnet, senior vice president and global practice leader digital transformation at consultancy company Capgemini told the Daze of Disruption conference in Melbourne this morning that when it comes to technology evolution, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Acknowledging there is a wide berth around the world of digital disruption, it’s not just specific to one industry, Bonnet said he and his research team have pinpointed three areas of navigation companies have to embark on in order to solidify their digital capabilities.

Transformation

Getting the tech a company wants to use into the business and beginning to transform it is not easy. It’s difficult because of what Bonnet has termed the “new grand challenge”.

“We live in a world today where every single technology development is pretty exponential,” he said. “The problem we have is, our organisation and our institutions… are not moving at the same point.” A gap is beginning to form between technology advancements and the ability for companies to keep up.

It’s about reducing this gap to transform the business, and some companies like Nike, Burberry and Starbucks are good at this.

There are two things companies like these do well, capability and leadership. “If you want to do digital transformation, you have to invest in digital technology. But if it was as easy as investing in digital technology, everyone would do it.”

The second dimension for actually driving change in the organisation comes down to leadership, he said. It’s about the vision, engagement, governance of the business and getting the IT and technology people to work together.

And the reasoning behind investing in digital transformation, besides trying to stay relevant, is to make money.

Strategy

The strategy aspect comes into play too with digital transformation. “We’re moving from this industrial world to the digital world, and most of our tools are in the industrial world,” said Bonnet. The value of an organisation used to be created inside a company, and now it’s created from the outside.

Bonnet also questioned whether the product itself matters as much anymore. For him, it’s all about the experience, so companies need to alter their strategy to continuously improve on the customer experience.

When it comes to a marketing strategy, it used to be all about consumption and brand control. However today, “it’s about co-creation, building communities, collaborative economy”.

 

Organisation

Finally, the organisational model is out-of-date, way out-of-date, and it needs to be changed.

“I have a personal conviction that there is no way we’re going to be able to get the benefit of what digital technology can bring us unless we do some pretty major surgery in the organisational model that we designed a hundred years ago,” said Bonnet.

Again, it’s not an easy thing to do, as it comes with the capability of “digital dexterity”, being able to manage digital, or at least trying to. The notion of either controlling the organisation or evolving it are no longer separate. Digital is breaking down these silos so that in order to control the business, it has to evolve.

It’s not easy to do and it can take forever, said Bonnet, but there are some companies already on the way there.




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