Kathy Gibson is at SAP Now in Sandton – Those companies more than 20 years old are the ones that are going to be disrupted.
“When they talk about disruption, they are talking about us,” says Stephen Green, chief technology officer of Dimension Data Middle East & Africa.
The digital tornado we see now is set to intensify, he says. “It’s difficult to predict where a tornado will touch down.”
Despite this, there are some technologies that are fundamentally changing the way we do business, Green adds.
“What we know, what we see with our customers around the world, is that disruption is a reality. And every business has to reinvent the way they do business.
“And this is not about an upgrade: it’s about turning around and going in the opposite direction.”
Dimension Data recommends that its customers rethink the business processes within its organisation,
Following this, they should integrate supplier, partner and customer ecosystem.
Next is a need to personalise the customer experience; and then the provision of new digital products and services.
The final step is to create new and disruptive business models.
“We tell our customers that the first step is to eliminate their legacy infrastructure; and to map their route towards a digital infrastructure fabric.
“The platform is the future: the quicker you get there, the quicker you can introduce new things in the organisation.”
Micro services and APIs are the new focus for IT as context-based applications break down monoliths to extract business value.
“Take the first step: the best way to avoid being disrupted is to disrupt yourself.”
Green adds that businesses have to develop new ways of thinking about work and using new metrics to measure what they are doing.
The majority of CEOs, however, have no clear success metric to measure what they are doing – and this could doom transformation to failure.