Digital Value Creation

I got into technology value creation exactly 19 years ago. I still remember how it happened. I read an article in the Harvard Business Review that made me question everything I was doing as a software executive. It was an article by Nick Carr, titled “IT doesn’t matter”.
The article claimed that technology added no value. Or specifically, technology didn’t create any strategic advantage. Why? Because technology was everywhere, ...

In the last few weeks, I was back on the planes meeting with clients and investors in London, New York, and San Francisco. We often talked about how the role of digital is changing for businesses and investors. How the early digital experimentations have all grown up,  real value is created now and many companies are becoming digitally reborn. 
But not all. 
Some struggled to take advantage of the digital revolution during ...

I was thinking about the most relevant trends for 2022. Almost everything we know about digital has changed and morphed in the last two years. So I looked at what my peers were predicting about the future. I counted over 500 different trends and predictions and it was hard to find a common theme that resonated with me. In the end, I narrowed them down to 5 major trends that I knew my customers were often talking about. So here is m...

Welcome to 2022. What a year we have had! While it represented a crisis on many fronts, it also created once in a generation across digital from automation to digital supply chains to new digital customer experiences to blockchain and crypto literally everywhere.

I had so many learnings from this unusual year - I chronicled them in 30 episodes in my channel and in several articles in Forbes. Here are my highlights from a year that w...

The majority of the companies nowadays are in some stage of digital transformation. Some are very tactical, improving their website and app maybe or automating basic customer interactions. Others are fundamentally changing how the business operates. Business model innovation and digital transformation are two buzzwords and they are increasingly interlinked. How should you and I think about business model changes as we become more d...

In the last couple of weeks, I had numerous conversations about what I call the hierarchy of value. A good friend of mine, I call him Jeff, a private equity investor coined this term to me a few years ago. He used this model to decide which improvement projects to invest in and which to pass on in his companies. He wanted simple rules to help his management teams that go beyond hard value and soft value. He even used it in his pers...

The massive global talent shortage is driving businesses to automate in even more areas of their operations. Surveys show that more than 60% of the companies already started their automation journey.  

There are always some tradeoffs, of course, when doing any enterprise-wide initiative. It would be cool if you could deploy new automated processes overnight. If you could just start your fully autonomous processes. But that...

Those of you following this channel, you know this. I’m obsessed with finding out what makes some companies succeed with digital transformation while others struggle. Companies of the same size, same industry, same access to talent, but very different results. \
One key factor is how the digital project gets initiated. Does the transformation start with the CEO or a line manager? Does it really need to happen for the business t...

I’m clearly not in the studio this week. In fact, I  am in Las Vegas at HIMSS, the largest healthcare tech conference. We had around 20,000 executives here live and thousands more online. This was the largest post-pandemic business conference focused on digital transformation.  This was also one of the first times so many businesses came together to share how they dealt with the crisis, what they learned from it, and what technolog...

If you ask someone how to create more value in business, you’re likely to hear the obvious - drive revenue growth and cut costs. That is of course the physics of any business. But every executive knows that it is not that simple. To increase revenues, you likely have to spend more and if you cut costs, revenue tends to suffer. Either way, revenues, and costs are just indicators, they are not specific actions you can take. In the la...