Abstract
The previous chapters provided you with a profound understanding of the three most important digital technologies that foster the digital transformation of private and public organizations: quantum computing, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence. The different applications and use cases described exemplarily at the end of each chapter revealed that each technology not only allows for optimizing existing products and services but also for exploring new growth opportunities in mature and entirely new markets or environments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In 2017, Sundar Pichai claimed the company was transitioning from “searching and organizing the world’s information to AI and machine learning,” that is, from a “mobile-first world to an AI-first world” [2]. In this context, Google’s research director Peter Norvig explained on Quora: “With information retrieval, anything over 80% recall and precision is pretty good – not every suggestion has to be perfect, since the user can ignore the bad suggestions. With assistance, there is a much higher barrier. You wouldn’t use a service that booked the wrong reservation 20% of the time, or even 2% of the time. So an assistant needs to be much more accurate, and thus more intelligent, more aware of the situation. That’s what we call ‘AI-first’” [3].
- 2.
Value creation and value capture are thus two sides of a coin. Value creation concerns the reason why customers choose to use a particular company, product, or service, which is sometimes known as value proposition. Value capture, on the other hand, simply arises from the difference between the sales price of a product or service and its internal cost.
- 3.
The competitive advantage is what protects a business from competitors, which is why the American legend of investing Warren Buffet, for instance, calls it “deep moats.”
- 4.
A more comprehensive treatise of digital business models is available in [13], for example.
- 5.
The two American strategic management scholars Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan developed a valuable tool in this context called discovery-driven planning. It allows for testing whether a given business strategy will be a fruitful approach or not by analyzing its underlying assumptions that have to prove true for the strategy to work. Further details are given in [17], for example.
- 6.
In this context, data coherence refers to a common and clear understanding of a project’s status and progress, for instance, across all divisions of an organization.
- 7.
According to the American business historian Alfred Chandler, driving both economies of scale and scope at the same time is the main challenge that business executives face today [10].
- 8.
A virtual machine emulates an entire computer system and thereby substitutes a physical computer.
- 9.
- 10.
Python was developed by the Dutch computer scientist Guido van Rossum in the late 1980s. The name actually came from the popular British comedy series Monty Python.
- 11.
Please also see the YouTube video “Core and Context” by Geoffrey Moore on www.youtube.com/watch?v=emQ2innvuPo.
- 12.
See, for example, www.microsoft.com/en-us/itshowcase/inside-the-transformation-of-it-and-operations-at-microsoft/ for further information.
- 13.
The American writer and activist Steward Brand described the underlying dynamics on the Hackers Conference in 1984 with his iconic phrase: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other” [27].
- 14.
The famous American economist Michael Porter wrote in 1996 that “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” [32].
- 15.
Further criteria for selecting suitable pilot projects can be found in [33], for example.
- 16.
Agile is the new economy term for being flexible and fast if you wish.
- 17.
Agile development teams are often called squads to highlight that they employ scrum or other agile methodologies. Scrum is an agile collaboration framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products. This term was coined by the two Japanese economists Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in 1986 for the first time [38].
- 18.
The term “excubation” was derived as a contraposition to “incubation” and refers to a smart separation of corporate exploitation and exploration endeavors. This approach to corporate innovation has been developed as many companies struggled to reintegrate successful products and services from corporate incubators back into their core business. The innovation efforts of incubators were either suffocated by the company’s core business or starved as an external venture that could not be integrated back into the company due to cultural and processual differences. Further details can be found on, for example, www.excubate.de/insights/corporate-innovation-needs-a-major-makeover/.
- 19.
According to this theory, the motivation of people arises due to two factors: (1) hygiene factors (2) and motivators. Hygiene factors are extrinsic to the work itself and include things like status, job security, salary, company policies, work conditions, and supervisory practices. They cannot give positive satisfaction and increase motivation, though dissatisfaction results from their absence. Motivators, on the other hand, refer to intrinsic elements of work that give positive satisfaction and lead to higher motivation. They include recognition, responsibility, personal growth, challenging work environment, opportunity to do something meaningful, and a sense of importance to an organization.
- 20.
In 2012, Google conducted an interesting study code-named “Project Aristotle” to determine the factors behind high-performing teams. More details can be found in [54].
- 21.
A minimum viable product is a first version of a novel product or service with just enough features to satisfy early customers. It is used to gather customer feedback for improving the product further.
- 22.
Please also see the author’s TED talk about this topic on https://youtu.be/YE_ETgaFVo8/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lang, V. (2021). Your Digital Action Plan. In: Digital Fluency. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6774-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6774-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4842-6773-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-6774-5
eBook Packages: Professional and Applied ComputingApress Access BooksProfessional and Applied Computing (R0)