One of our consultants was recently engaged to assist in the development of a presentation pack for a national logistics organisation. The pack was to be presented at an IT seminar on infrastructure hosting, however this particular slide also contains some quite important aspects around the services a customer aware organisation needs to take into consideration in the divergent and disruptive age we now live in.
Change values vary and are quite often unique across sectors, geographic locations, market demographics and are quite often time sensitive. IT change values need to align to support business objectives and leverage the technologies available to deliver the services the customer needs or wants.
Digital Darwinism has usually been associated with businesses not being able to keep up with evolving technologies. Obvious examples of this are Blockbuster, Borders bookstores and Polaroid, however unless companies engage in disruptive innovation that there will be many more that will join this list.
However, with an escalating rate of technology change, an increasingly demanding customer base, competing companies and the additional complexity of global trade, Digital Darwinism is not just confined to the adoption of evolving technologies – in a highly competitive environment you may need to be an early adopter or even the first adopter to survive.
Brian Solis said it well, when he stated that “No Business is Too Big to Fail or Too Small to Succeed”.
However, although not a direct quote of Charles Darwin himself, we believe the following two summations of his work are something to always keep in mind in life as well as business:
- It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
- In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.
