Traveling, tailoring and technology

During the past month, I’ve travelled extensively around the Asia Pac region reacquainting myself with clients, engaging with our extensive employee populations in Australia, Singapore, South Korea and India, as well as talking to media and influencers about our business.And while I did a lot of talking, I also spent just as much time listening. But listening with a purpose, because I wanted to use my trip as an opportunity to test out some thinking I’ve been doing about where the technology industry, and the world, is heading.Along with several of my senior colleagues at IBM, I believe that we are at another inflection point in technology and business. Big transitions in technology and business happen every 25 years. For those of us who can remember, there was the micro processing revolution of the 70s and 80s. An exciting time that caused us to reimagine the possible.And then in the 90s we entered the network revolution, which has delivered us greater levels of connectedness, information sharing and social interactions at scale, than any time in human history. That era culminated with the first wave of the digital revolution, which favored a small number of platform giants that benefited from the network effect –in search, in commerce, and in social.The next era of business and technology will be driven by data, creating opportunities and challenges for our clients, for technology, and for society. This next phase will go beyond networks and into expertise and insights delivered by data.And given that 80% of the world’s data sits on the private servers of businesses and institutions around the world, it means that it is not searchable. This means that established companies will have a distinct advantage when it comes to mining this information to extract value.And when artificial intelligence and cloud computing are applied to this data, it will allow the incumbent companies of the world to turn previously unusable insights into competitive differentiators.So, what did I find when I posed this point of view to the ‘good and the great’people that I spoke to on my travels? Well, it reminded me of someone trying on a new jacket. You put it on, you examine the fit, the tailoring, the colours, and the style. And you attempt to work out whether it suits you, and whether it projects the right image of you.That’s what I felt people were doing. Trying on these observations to see whether it fit their experiences, both of their industry and of the world. But ultimately, as with many things in life, the advantages will go to those companies that move first, and move decisively.