(Originally published elsewhere in 2019) This post continues my study of Digital Transformation opportunities and themes as described in the DTI assessment[1] from May 2018, primarily focused on what the DTI report describes as the Platform economy.
Themes
Just to summarise where we’re at, the DTI[1] notes the following are key themes that have emerged from the analysis of digital transformation across 13 industries, and I’ve worked through them as follows:
- Maximizing return on digital - discussed in a prior post
- Digital Consumption - discussed in a prior post
- Digital Enterprise - discussed in prior post
- Platform Economy - discussed in this post
- Societal Implications - future post
- Unlocking Digital Value to Society - future post
Let’s dive in and work through what the platform economy holds.
Platforms
As described in the DTI report, value is derived from platforms in these ways..
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to drive transformed business models,
through more frequent and complex interactions amongst businesses B2B platforms are requiring businesses to think about innovation and digital business models in new and disruptive ways.
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to help ecosystems expand,
interconnected systems and new business models are increasing collaboration between businesses, partners, vendors and the businesses they support to drive highly complex always-on systems capable of supporting local, national and global business. Platforms even create means for other startups or established organisations to leverage those platforms to create services and integrations which could generate new revenue. Atlassian is a good example of that - app market places and plugin ecosystems allow others to leverage the popularity of the platforms to deliver new features or integrations which ultimately become revenue sources to those players.
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creating a win-win for industry and society,
The DTI report notes a US$100 trillion value at stake from digital transformation, and it states society can benefit as much as the the industries.. We’ll need to unpick that.
DTI further notes changes to Strategies and Operational capabilities, such as
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a) changes to pricing models to outcome based objectives, and these may be especially important if considering the move from ownership to access-based models for some services or products.
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b) strategies to position an organisation as having a platform mindset, especially for key services or product offerings. Confidence in the customer segment, new or existing, must be high to avoid the ‘build it and they will come’ platform possibly where there are no customers needing or wanting what has been built.
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c) platform-driven innovation, which is especially important to innovate and provide a base for partners and customers to derive and even create further value.
The only thing I think I want to work through here is the win-win for industry and society, just to be clear on what the value to society is envisaged to be. I’ll do that in another post.
[1] http://reports.weforum.org/digital-transformation/
Originally published elsewhere on 31 March, 2019.
24+ years experience in solving business problems and maximising opportunities through technology in a variety of industries, public and private sector internationally. I founded architectFWD™ to provide knowledge and trusted advice in the areas of strategy, technology, cloud and digital to enable organisations to become Digital Leaders.