The environment of a digital society

Culture and technology set the course

The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and that pace is the product of human activity. Culture and technology are two dominant factors of change, and their interaction is setting society's course: technological development shapes culture, which in turn drives the development of new technologies.

Today's society is radically different from that of the beginning of the century, and virtually every part of it must adapt to the new environment faster and more frequently. Concepts such as emerging technologies, cloud services, streaming platforms, artificial intelligences, or the Internet of Things have become commonplace. Individuals adopt them with less and less resistance, but adaptation is not as easy for organizations, where new practices and ways of working take longer to define and adopt as a group.

Digitalization challenges for organizations

Companies are not exempt from the challenge of digital transformation: constantly changing the way they work, adopting new technologies without hurting processes and results, in order to stay competitive, endure, and be a vehicle of progress for their clients, workers, suppliers, shareholders, and society.

The fundamental element of digital transformation in companies is information: the raw material for making good decisions, understanding the market, optimizing operations, and minimizing logistics costs. The challenge can be rephrased as: obtaining, treating, and using the information from all industrial processes to continuously generate business value.

Reducing the challenge to such a brief statement might seem oversimplified, because the path from having information to using it is not direct. That path — the data culture — is made up of several stretches that must be understood and implemented correctly: as in a chain, tuning every link produces the value of the whole process, while a single failed link wastes the entire transformation effort.

Measure, model, and improve

There is a famous phrase attributed to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets improved.” In essence it is right, but the idea is incomplete: measurement alone is not enough to produce improvement. You must turn measurement and data into information, and information into improvement. And that requires a technology that is not physical but intellectual: modeling the process you want to improve.

“If you want the POWER to improve, Measure… if you want to Improve, Model.”