By Professor Pieter Steyn, Cranefield College
The coronavirus lockdown currently experienced by the entire globe causing all organisations to consider online activities, has attracted profound attention to the importance of key enabling technologies.
Moreover, in recent years the world has witnessed simultaneous and profound changes in all areas of private and public corporate activities. Organisational and private lives are becoming highly volatile and value-driven, demanding continuous innovation and learning. These changes, caused by the inflow of new digital enabling technologies intertwining with our daily lives, influence the way we are performing our organisational activities and daily chores.
Enabling technologies are defined by Business Dictionary as equipment and/or methodology that, alone or in combination with associated technologies, provide the means to generate giant leaps in performance and capabilities of the user. For example, the coming together of telecommunication technologies, Internet, and groupware has levelled the field so that even smaller firms are able to compete in areas where they otherwise could not.
The “Roundtable on Digitizing European industry – Work Group 1 Report 2017”, avers that “digitalization is essentially an innovation issue”, and organisations are approaching it with the usual wide variety of attitudes, methods and expectations encountered in managing innovation. These attitudes depend on the organisation’s digital maturity. The urgent need for such innovation and change should rather be explained and motivated by the language of increasing profitability, competitiveness or customer satisfaction rather than hard technologies. They believe that abstract terms such as “Industry 4.0” or “digital transformation” are likely to be unattractive in some business environments, like small and medium-sized enterprises.
Digital maturity is about adapting the organisation to compete effectively in an increasingly digital environment. Maturity goes far beyond simply implementing new technology by aligning the company’s strategy, workforce, culture, technology, and structure to meet the digital expectations of customers, employees, and partners. Rather, digital maturity is a continuous and ongoing process of adaptation to a changing digital landscape.
Global intensive digitalisation processes and technical complexity of industry products and services are generating the new landscape of Industry 4.0 markets. The global and regional markets are in the process of radical strategic change and transformation. Big companies will not solely dominate on these markets anymore. There is a place for innovative small and medium-sized companies that are becoming global leaders with their innovative products. Capacities to generate market attractive products and services by exploitation of the creative mix of own, regional and global technology resources formed in the innovative, flexible digitalised processes of agile, value and supporting supply chains, are preconditions for business success in the Industry 4.0 economy.
Allocation and sustainable exploitation of regional innovation potential can generate benefits for all involved parties in such endeavors. Industry 4.0 businesses are flourishing in regions and countries with adequate competencies, available resources, transformational leadership, sound corporate culture and sustainable regional support. Modern Industry 4.0 organisations in regions and countries are searching for new mechanisms to create favourable business conditions by providing adequate supporting services.
It is evident that technology changes are not enough to achieve expected results, as was the case in the past. To exploit innovative technologies for the benefit of all stakeholders requires a profound understanding of how these novelties will affect personal and business lives, organisations in developed and less-developed countries, and how they will reshape organisational landscapes, societies and culture. It is vitally important to gain a holistic understanding of the risks involved and to plan appropriate solutions for the timely mitigation of the risk and associated complexity. The burning question is how organisations, big and small, can successfully cope with such complex strategic transformation and change matters.