ContinuousNext was the focus of the opening Plenary session at Gartner Symposium on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. As you’d expect from an organisation with the reputation of Gartner, they didn’t fail to create an environment of learning and possibilities. More than 2,500 CIOs from across Asia Pacific were in attendance along with almost 50 vendors of a variety of technical solutions to most of the challenges faced by businesses today. However, not many Vendors were discussing or providing solutions to the challenges of tomorrow – which Gartner have wrapped up into the term “ContinousNext”.
OK, so this is a play on continuous improvement, but the word next does invoke a more urgent temporal aspect into the conversation. Next is defined as “the one immediately after”. Continuous means “without interuption”, so ContinousNext icould be defined as “without interuption, undertake the activity immediately after”. In effect, Gartner are saying that there is no time to pause on the journey to stay in touch with the digital world as it evolves, and our evolution personally and within business alongside it. The word improvement could also insinuate that the thing we are changing was wrong, or bad, and that isn’t necessarily the case; change is an evolution – the starting point isn’t necessarily a bad place. The term “next” can remove that emotive element from the change conversation.
There are 5 pillars to ContinuousNext;
- Digital Product Management
As more and more of what we do as business becomes digital, the discussion needs to take place about how we best manage these new customer interactions. There is a need to design customer-centric digital products and services and this requires a different mind-set than project or programme management – it needs a focus on Product Management. Most organisations do not consider what they deliver as product; this shift in thinking is necessary if what businesses produce are to continue to be successful as we move into the well established digital economy. - Privacy
Consumers are driving the privacy requirement for every business they deal with. Customer privacy should be guarded fiercely; customers will find other providers for the services they require if they believe you are not doing enough to protect their personal information. GDPR in Europe has created the benchmark which has moved the Privacy conversation to the top table and is forcing an ethical conversation about managing this information alongside other information sources used within the organisation. - Culture
A successful business culture needs to be dynamic. Research has found that this is the single greatest influence on an organisations ability to adapt to the future. Understand where you fit on these scales and applying Culture Hacking into the organisation to influence cultural change to move your business to where it needs to be, is an important consideration for the Senior Leadership Team. - Augmented Intelligence
Rather than artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence adds advanced machine capabilities to the human, assisting in areas where the machine is better than the human, but recognising that intelligence in the machine is a very long way away. Human decision use our experience and empathy, which is missing from the machine. If you can remove repetitive tasks from peoples lives, they can apply themselves to activities which add more value. Machines will also learn to adapt to the human; at the moment we adapt our behaviour to make use of machines – this will begin to change. - Digital Twin
The concept of the Digital Twin has been around for some time, but is now extending from engineering disciplines to other areas of interest. The Digital Twin of the Organisation (DTO) will provide a digital model of the people, processes, technology and data within a business. The model will enable scenarios to be run which will inform the change decision, providing assurance that hasn’t been available before. Larger organisations are already on this journey, but it will be some time before the technology is readily available for implementation on a scale that will make this capability available for everyone.
If any of these concepts and trends resonate with you and you’d like to start a conversation about how LINQ can help get you started, please get in touch using our contact form here.
We will be diving into each of these topics in the coming weeks, so please add us to your reading list to stay up to date.
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