Rethink Digital Transformation
No doubt that “Digital Transformation” is a hot topic. The spread of COVID-19 has accelerated the concern as social distancing is forcing businesses of all kinds and sizes to rethink their scale and efforts in automating and integrating digital initiatives into their solutions for tackling the detrimental impacts caused by the world-wide epidemic.
Many books have been published lately related to the topic and terms such as “disruption”, “platform”, “Big Data”, “Cloud Computing”, “Artificial Intelligence”, “Blockchain” and the like are becoming common. Nevertheless, I still find constant inspiration from two books published over 20 years ago, which already foresaw what’s happening around us.
If you want original ideas to rethink your strategy in dealing with digital transformation, “Blown to Bits” by Philip Evans and “Information Rules” by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian will make your day. In “Blown to Bits”, Evans talked about disintermediation, deconstruction of supply chain and organizations, competing on reach, richness, and affilation, all the things we have been talking about surrounding disruptions, platform, and transformation. “Information Rules” went behind the scene to discuss the network effect and how it enables IT standards and platforms to emerge and rule our lives through lock-in and new economics of information. As Internet business model thinking pioneers, the authors already gave us the food for thought to deal with our current challenges. If you can add these two books to your personal collection despite the aged publication dates, I’m sure you’ll look at the current best sellers on the subject quite differently. History is always a good teacher!
