12 Amazing Impacts of the Digital Economy
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The IT Services Supermarket
CIOs anticipate every business need and provide a rich supply of services. The business customer acquires them through self-service delivery. Because services are in the cloud, people's geographic locations no longer matter. -
Rapid Brand Recognition
In the old days, brand establishment required extended, massive ad campaigns. Today, a viral video can take a company from obscurity to stardom within a day. -
The One-On-One Customer Relationship
Social tech has forced organizations to demonstrate integrity and personalized interest in the customers. What was once "product" is now an "experience." -
The "Open Door" Company
Because digital tech slashes transaction and collaboration costs, leading organizations make their boundaries porous, using the Internet to harness knowledge, resources and capabilities from the outside. -
The Social Workplace
Tools such as wikis, blogs, collaborative filtering and decision dashboards are speeding up innovation, reducing internal transactions costs and boosting efficiencies and productivity. They also improve employee satisfaction and retention. -
The Empowerment of Analytics
No longer confined to sales and financial assessments, big data is now collected and analyzed from many sources to support a broad range of functions. Thus, individual workers are encouraged to initiate key value-building decisions. -
Consumer-Driven Price
Sales and marketing leaders no longer dictate prices. With rapid product-to-market cycles, comparison shopping sites and other influencers, the consumer market now calls the shots. -
A Super Supercomputer
Quantum computers, which Google and others are investigating or developing, will be literally millions of times more powerful than today's supercomputer. -
The Next Frontier of Artificial Intelligence
IBM's Watson doesn't understand questions; it uses brute computing force to answer them. But IBM is working on neurosynaptic chips which are designed to function like the human brain. -
A Wiser Job Candidate
Candidates arrive armed with knowledge and intelligent questions about an organization's culture, values and goals. Which means hirers are replacing traditional inquisition interview approaches with a dialogue model. -
The Blurring of Work and Learning
With endless resources of information about everything at their fingertips, employees accumulate great volumes of knowledge with every task to benefit their organizations—and their careers. -
Lasting Professional Relationships
Due to viable alternatives to full-time employment—like part-time jobs, consultancies and contracting gigs—exiting employees may return to bring value to your company. Thanks to social media, you'll know where to find them.
As Ferris Bueller once put it, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." For CIOs, these words convey special relevance: They make decisions every day which go beyond steering their companies toward new levels of profitability—they're often changing the world of commerce with their choices. And, sometimes, if you don't "stop and look around," you could lose appreciation for everything that you've helped shape (hopefully, more for the better than the worse). The new book, "The Digital Economy, Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill), further examines this topic with an appealing, philosophical bent. Author Don Tapscott revisits his groundbreaking 1995 book, "The Digital Economy," with fresh insights about how IT innovation has transformed business. The following slides contain 12 takeaway observations as adapted from the anniversary edition, in which Tapscott weighs in on social media, the cloud, analytics, artificial intelligence and other tech difference-makers. Combined, they signify that CIOs and their tech teams are truly creating a Brave New World. For more about the book, click here.