Digital Transformation and Competitive Decision-Making


The winning trinity in competitive decision-making includes people, ideas and things according to the renowned military strategist John Boyd. Although competitive decision-making is not yet an Olympic sport, it affects us all.  Leaders (people) must become trained experts at using digital technologies to make fast decisions.  Leaders must use the right strategies and methodologies (ideas) to make wise decisions fast, and they must collect the needed data and analyze it fast enough using the best solutions (things).  If any component of this trinity is weak, it will be hard to compete.

In a recent survey of high tech VP level and above executives that I conducted, few companies have a formal training program in place to help develop their leaders to be skilled at digital transformation and competitive decision-making.  Most enterprises are just rolling the dice on the skill levels of their leadership.  Given the emerging challenges that digital transformation introduces to a complex business, I would strongly advise companies to invest in formal digital leadership development.

Some of the key goals of digital transformation are to speed up and improve interactions with digital customers, and to be able to react faster to new information.  As digital technologies (things) provide more real-time data, and real-time data analysis, new strategies (ideas) for making real-time decisions must be implemented by leaders (people) or their proxies.  In the future, more and more proxies involved in real-time decision-making will be in the form of robotic process automation systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Any business process where there is a documented best practice for how best to respond to various data inputs can be automated.  As data inputs become more real-time, human leadership decision-making becomes the source of latency in the system.  I predict that decision-making will increasingly be a source of competition, and that decisions will soon be divided into those where there is a defined best option already which allows for rapid automation, and those that have ill-defined options and require humans' capacity for creativity to solve.

My latest video from the field:


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Kevin Benedict
President, Principal Analyst, Futurist, the Center for Digital Intelligence™
Website C4DIGI.com
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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