How to get digital-icious?

Here’s a quick double #DIP on the how to get digital-icious i.e., the what and how of digital:

1. The what: Last Friday involved a productive day-long working session with my Oil, Gas and Chemical Digital Vision Fellows Group at Deloitte. One of the revelations early on in the day was that ‘digital’ is the term of the moment and there’s already fatigue around the term. My hypothesis in previous posts around the amorphous nature of ‘digital’ was validated by some of the digital leads at Deloitte who candidly admitted to avoid defining the term during client conversations.

People tend to get hung up on what digital transformation means, looking for an Oxfordian definition. Well, let me break it to you, it doesn’t exist. Focus on the value statements and “how” it creates enabling capabilities. 

2. The how: I have the big Ninja blender but I struggle making actually dips and sauces in it because it’s too big. So, I just ordered a small food processor. On some philosophical level, I was picturing the small blades of this food processor churning at the right speed to finely chop the cilantro, jalapeños and garlic to create the desired mix. The food processor provides the right accelerating environment for the ingredients to come together to create something digital-icious (that marks the coining of the first term on this blog). The big Ninja capabilities can be related to the need to invest heavily in digital transformation to get the desired results. Well, that's clearly not the case. It's about being agile, starting small and then scaling, leaving a little room for failure. If you add a small bunch of cilantro, one jalapeno and two cloves of garlic in the food processor, and it goes bad, you don't feel bad. If you quintuple those quantities and run the big Ninja, and it doesn't turn out right - you realize you have wasted time, material and resources.

Additionally, the small food processor apparently has grooves on top to add salt, olive oil, etc. to refine taste and texture as needed. Similarly, digital technologies require incubators to allow rapid prototyping. An incubator is a high-tech, high-energy environment where a cross-functional team comprising of end users essentially lock themselves for ~12 weeks to create a minimum viable version of the digital product in question. Like the food processor, they have agile channels to allow refinement and iteration until they achieve the desired digital-icious mix.

Get digital, make something digital-icious!