Digital transformations are always motivated by improving an organization’s performance at one or another level.  In some cases the focus is improving performance in an individual task, like increasing production quality in a product or component, increasing a facility’s throughput, or accelerating innovation in product development. Each of these contributes to improvement in its own area of focus. Each is made possible by integrating one or more enhanced digital tools into its work flow.

At the same time and at a different level, there is deep and growing interest in leadership teams in the contribution analytics, artificial intelligence, and enhanced digital tools can make to improving results in current operations and in evaluating new opportunities.  There is strong appreciation for the value that well-managed data, insightful modeling, and effective use of the outputs can provide.

The contributions enhanced digital solutions can make in each of these areas of operation are worth understanding in their own right.  Even while they are impactful on their own they also set the groundwork for an emerging dimension of digital transformation that holds great promise for amplifying their value even further.  One can envision additional benefits that would emerge from connecting these individual islands of transformation being worked on independently into a broadly empowering, fully connected pipeline of applications, analytics, and AI focused on optimizing performance continuously at every level, using every bit of available data and tooling that can be applied.  Practitioners could leverage this broader set of tools and data for their own benefit, the organization could harvest the insights of a richer cross-section of teams in determining its goals, and the velocity of transformation across levels and groups could be measurably improved.

The technologies and practices needed to enable such a powerful, fully connected pipeline are arriving at a level in which practical steps toward realization can be taken.  It is an opportunity of profound importance for team members and stakeholders in operations, data science, R&D, customer facing and senior management roles. Exploring the improvements that digital transformations can provide at each of these levels is an area of research ACG is pursuing actively:  

• We are applying special focus to developments in a select number of industry sectors (manufacturing, logistics/supply chain, energy production/distribution, and healthcare)
• We are analyzing contributions to the goal from specific categories of digital innovation
  • End-systems’ digital enhancements
  • Use of standardized sector information models and underlying protocols
  • ICT innovations supporting digital transformation in these target use cases and sectors in networking (wireless and wired), computing (edge and multi-cloud) and storage
  • Unified data fabrics
  • Always on, active analytics and AI

For a broader introduction to these evolutions and their impact, read Paul Parker-Johnson’s research brief on the topic. Stay tuned for additional analysis and research about developments at each level in the field.

Contact Paul Parker-Johnson at  pj@acgcc.com to discuss his research.