Technology changes what is possible. Every “age” has a feel, a zeitgeist. That zeitgeist is very much a function of the fact that every age has a defining technology. The age we are just now entering has four defining technologies – Social, Mobile, Analytics, & Cloud – the SMAC stack. The economics and ergonomics of experimentation have changed. It has never been easier – or more profitable – to do new things. To do new things require new modes of thought. That is why I advocate a “cognitive reboot.”
2014 is going to be a BIG year for change. All the environmental factors contributing to massive change [e.g., dissatisfaction with status quo, disruptive buzzing of new participants deploying new technologies in unique and unorthodox ways, and available/affordable capital] are in massive abundance. The organizations which will truly prosper in 2014 are those who attack the SMAC stack, not one technology as a time but focus rather on how all these four disruptive technologies can fundamentally change value drivers.
If you aren’t at a parity point regarding social, mobile, analytics, and cloud mastery – employees won’t work for you, and customers won’t buy from you. You can’t get much more disruptive than that – no workers and no revenues. It places content management [meaning making] back on top of the strategic agenda.
Industrial-age enterprises were designed to operate at the lowest possible informational level – because, at the time, information was scarce, hard to collect, expensive to store, and impossible to analyze in a timely basis. The fact that there is a super-abundance of information floating around for anyone to do anything with IS NOT A BUG – IT IS THE DEFINING FEATURE OF OUR NEW CIVILIZATION.
Organizations need to re-examine what they do and why they do it – down to the activity level – with an eye toward how the SMAC stack changes things.