The notion of digital transformation still has plenty of gas left in the tank.
Companies taking on digital transformation initiatives are making great improvements by using technology as a strategic lever to orient every aspect of their business to serving customer and constituent needs.
Soon enough though, the term will encompass everything businesses do – because companies that fail to change will cease to exist. At that point, digital transformation will start looking more like a clown car than a chariot through the clouds to a better tomorrow.
This inevitable crowding effect always leads me to think about what’s next in the queue of essential but vague technology initiatives.
Perhaps the self-driving business (or SDB) will be our ride to the next future state.
What would the SDB look like?
Is a manager app going to start bossing a hybrid of employees and robots around to get things done? Or, could we see a day where much of the leadership suite itself is replaced by some sort of autonomous decision system?
Many IT pros would argue that an autonomous system could make better impartial decisions than many of the worst executives they’ve encountered — no more gut instincts, incomplete insights about technology, cronyism or misaligned bonus packages.
I’d like to meet the first board or CEO who signs off on an executive suite replacement! Since that is unlikely except perhaps in government scenarios, we can expect the self-driving business to use technology as the augmentation of an entire range of business activities from work coordination to decision support.
Who’s going to steer this SDB transformation?
Since I started my career in software designing games, I like to think of the competing factions or cultures attempting to wrest control of this scenario, a la the classic Civilization series.
What technology schools of artificial thought could end up driving this new wave? And who rides shotgun?
Auto-Didactic. Whether you call it Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Intelligence or Applied Intelligence, without some AI/ML on board, you only get automation, not autonomy. This approach designs self-learning behaviors into the system, so appropriately intelligent reactions can be produced, even if business conditions change. In a sense this improvement capability is going to be the substrate of any intelligent system.
Data Operator. The intelligent capture, processing and interpretation of data for system learning, real-time insights and reactivity is core to any AI-like initiative. Coming out of the data conservatories of digital monks working in Analytics and Big Data, and secure data migration and storage, with local workloads forced to SD-WAN-like network edges for performance, data still represents the lifeblood of any computing system as well as any business decision or activity, so it would be hard to picture SDB without it.
Behavioral Designer. Augmenting the efficiency and capabilities of human workers armed with automation is one thing, but increasing upside and reducing friction is the ultimate goal of any behavioral business control process. This approach generates a cognitive interface for interacting with customers and predicting the right options for the company to respond to the world around it. Coming out of the human-centered design movement, with Low-Code and DPA interpretation of digital-to-business processes, this friendlier approach could grow rapidly in popularity.
Extreme DevOps. Imagine if the automation of software delivery reaches an architecture level of skill. You’d have smart software making better software: more modular applications, easily integrated, observable, secure by design, self-updating and self-organizing. The SDB acts as an operational mastermind, plotting the business course while composing new workflows from neatly defined functions. This seems the least likely candidate until you think about the path from test-driven development (TDD) to Continuous Delivery and AIOps, when a comprehensive test of a composed environment also represents the documentation and execution of a unique business process.
Executive Function. For the enterprise E-Suite, transformation is all about the money. Arising out of financial management, forecasting and decision support functions, this SDB is a hybrid human and computer management layer. By interpreting market signals, orders, cost and revenue data from the field far faster than any human, every participant in the business receives guidance or instructions based on advanced forecasting and prediction engines, with ties to execution level systems of record and human approval processes.
Optimize Us All. This holistic movement comes from supply chain optimization combined with environmental concerns. This makes sense because the DevOps/software development world and the latest business operational thinking both owe a philosophical debt to early supply chain constraint-based theory. Efficiency, customer value and achieving the global good are the critical optimization factors here, and all decisions the business makes are weighted on these fulcra.
The Intellyx Take
Cop out warning: there may be no clear winner in this race. It may also turn out that the rate of change in business will always outpace the rate of innovation in autonomous systems.
Still, it’s great fun pondering a self-driving business, and its supporting organizational structure and technologies. While all of the flavors of SDB would include machine learning and advanced data operations, the primacy of one or two approaches would become evident at any company.
So a financial services firm may lean on the behavioral and executive archetypes for better differentiation and growth, while a consumer electronics firm would be concerned with its supply chain optimization and DevOps in the lab for innovation speed.
By default, if new startups or other technology players don’t arrive at the right combinations of SDB ready solutions, perhaps all this future-think way forward will simply fall under the banner of ‘stuff Google or Amazon does.’
Buckle up!
©2020 Intellyx LLC. The author is solely responsible for the content of this article. At the time of writing, none of the vendors mentioned are Intellyx customers. Image source: “Sycle” by Eric Seaholm with permission.
