Do not leave the tree hiding the forest of digital disruptions
It is time to stop speaking only because of the digital revolution to force everything on the back of the portmanteau word "digital" we forget that there are other equally important revolutions and came to the conclusion that learning to each coding it solve all the problems of growth, education and skills of the working population. Yes, digital is important but it is only one of many facets of the revolutions of the twenty-and-first century.
Have you recently visited a salon on electricity? Or have you attended a conference on "How electricity will change our economy and society"? Probably not, unless "recently" means 1915. Yet changes that electricity bring today are considerable, the electric bike to the Autolib or Tesla battery , renewable ways of producing, the lighting of cities by LEDs or simply because it turns the digital servers ... But then, electricity is a "granted" of our economy that is "obvious". How long does it take to leaders to understand that the same is true of digital? To stop blissfully to focus on the wonders of the digital and the ways it will change our world? To understand that digital has become normal? Such as electricity, such as nuclear power, such as radiotherapy or as computer where Moore's Law continues to rotate after so many decades.
Why is not the issue
To focus on the Digital "tsunami" is finally put everything in - even that which has no reason to be there - or do not see that there is upheaval just as important elements for which the digital is as central as electricity.
The 3D printer is not much more "digital" than a machine tool CNC, yet it will revolutionize the industry through new uses of the laser, to new materials and new product designs. Graphene and all new materials have nothing digital. Medicine and neuroscience, although researchers are using computers, are preparing us considerable revolutions. The GPS function primarily through satellites and advanced mapping, "digital" content is also marginal its power supply. The smartphone has the power of a computer ten years ago but the real revolution comes Apps and imagination of those who create them.
Most "disruptions" that affect our industries are only incidentally the fact of digital. See digital as a means of progress but do not forget the others hide.
The real questions are elsewhere
Disruptions actually come elsewhere, although a number of them the digital allows their rapid application. They come initially from the combination of technologies and economic or sociological factors that make old things new way or to produce objects and new services.
UBER is far from being only a digital innovation. It is the combination - born first and foremost around a customer service which had disappeared and regulation anomaly and aberrant market - technologies like geolocation, staffing independent drivers, yield management, the automated payment systems, Apps, etc. and also a sociology where collaborative and collective became economic values. If SpaceX company becomes a real space if Tesla is revolutionizing the power or electricity storage automobile when BlaBlaCar reinvents the transport, if the transport system Hyperloop risks disrupting some long-distance transport, it is not that the incidental and mainly thanks to digital by the spirit of innovation, combining technologies, reinventing customer service, customer journey, and often through the extinction of absurd and outdated administrative restrictions, etc. And then we wonder why this had not been done earlier. Yes, the digital has significantly reduced transaction costs and allowed certain innovations to occur faster and more efficiently. It has enriched the possibility of innovation but as electricity did before him. It is not that invented the digital vaccine cancer or new car batteries.
Connected objects, another example, are first objects; it is by their side "objects" they will change our worlds. Well, they are "connected" so what? Our radios have been for 120 years. The volume of connections is much larger, so what? It is through the value they will bring they are important and it is not theirs, it belongs to those who will invent these values and uses.
The Big Data and Artificial Intelligence have a high content in digital but not algorithms and therefore without mathematics, BigData would be a packet informs and Artificial Intelligence would have no future. The math is not softwares or 'digital' but of human intelligence.
The real question is no longer in the digital capabilities but in which men and companies to combine technologies, including digital course but not only, especially the various resources of intelligence, to change the world.
The answers are in the human
Henceforth we agreed not see digital as a means - such as energy, new materials, societal availability for collaboration and sharing a society, etc. - Shows the possibilities and the real issues. It becomes obvious that such know -how of tomorrow are not only in coding but in many other areas. The coding will soon be a commodity like any other. Give a tablet to all school children is only a means, but is this really the best for the development of the most important talent, their creativity? The computer may be a smarter man days but by then human intelligence should be encouraged, not only its know -how digital.
The strategy of any company should not be digital, it must first be reinventing strategy, it has to be change, it must encourage the disruption, it must challenge the ways of working, structures of labor, systems and procedures surrounding the latter and the internal elements of culture hampering innovation. The digital is not a threat, it is at least an opportunity. The threat is in the rigidity and lack of imagination.
The answer is necessarily human first. It should allow each company and everyone to see how it is handicapped by today's systems and is in fact blind to possible innovations, what obsolescence that we all face is neither accepted or perceived fought. If nothing is done, the disruption will come from the outside and the "uberisation" that affect us will be attributed, wrongly, to the arrival of digital while his case is much simpler: lack of vision imaginative executives and employees.
Human capital policies, fundamental element of any strategy are essential in this changing context of possible innovations. HR must be the catalysts of real news answers. For this they need to question everything you need to remove the existing organizations to unleash the imagination, rather than what to add to it. Helping everyone to learn how to use digital tools and train there it's good. But allow everyone to unlock its potential, to break free from obsolete systems (diverse and varied controls, hierarchies old formulas or development expertise, for example) to look permanent watch what happens in the world and imagine new combinations of technologies to deliver new products and services or to better provide the former is better. This is even better than everyone in his daily life, is willing to imagine and use solutions and new tools, everyone expects the same from its current suppliers be it transport, his bank, his insurance or its kitchen equipment.
It's not that digital is an opportunity (or threat), it is the imagination and the struggles against the rigidities. They are collaborators in neurons, not in the 0 and 1 digital.
