Digital Disruptions: Technology Innovations Powering 21st_ Century Business

YouTube challenges TV. Internet radio usurps traditional local AM/FM broadcasts. Facebook and MySpace redefine political dialogue. Virtual worlds and augmented reality transform how we live, work and learn.

These are just some of the digital disruptions rocking today’s marketplace.

"Digital disruptions are about information and communication technologies that change business models deeply, and often shockingly," says Digital Disruptions (PDF, 7.5MB), a new report by CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF). "These disruptions, on par with the telephone and automobile, transform the marketplace and society so completely that it can take decades for their full effects to be realized."

CSC has been applying a digital lens to disruptive technologies since 1999. This new report identifies the latest disruptions being generated by the information technology and communications industry.

 

"With digital disruptions, all the rules change," asserts Alex Fuss, LEF associate and the report’s lead researcher. "It doesn’t matter how good your current business plan is. You need to adapt to the new realities of the disruptive technology and, in many cases, ’roll your own’."

Fuss examines seven major digital disruptions in the report — New Media, Living in a New Reality, Social Power, Information Transparency, New Wave of Waves, Platform Makeover and Smart(er) World.

Here’s a brief look at each one:

New Media
"New media is the ordinary person — you and me — creating and sharing life experiences through videos," says the report. "It is the citizen journalist, the blogger, the podcaster, the basement musician, the cell phone author."

Returning to the basics of personal storytelling, new media is replacing the consumer with the ’proviewer’ — a producer and proactive viewer. So ubiquitous is new media that in 2007 five of the 10 best-selling novels in Japan were originally written as short chapters on cell phones, published later as books.

In 2008, MSN provided more than 3,000 hours of live on-demand coverage of the Beijing Olympics in partnership with NBC, allowing the proviewer to choose camera angles to display — and highlights to replay — essentially turning him into a show producer. And the American public submitted questions via YouTube for the CNN/YouTube-sponsored 2007 televised U.S. presidential debates. They also created commercials shown during the Super Bowl in 2008. Everyone, now, is an equal participant in a global dialogue.

As the Internet changes the way content is produced and consumed, advertising is following suit.

"The traditional (TV) ad network, with neatly delineated spots and breaks," says the report, "has given way to a new ad network supporting Internet content that features wildly irregular spots and breaks, if any." Internet ads are better targeted, making them more effective for the marketer and more relevant for the viewer. Ad impact — based on click-throughs and other Internet-provided metrics — can be more accurately measured than Nielsen-type sampling.

Living in a New Reality
Virtual worlds obliterate time and space boundaries imposed by the physical world, enabling us to do what would be impossible — or nearly impossible — in our real environments.

"Virtual worlds and virtual reality will play an increasingly significant role in our personal and professional lives," says the report. "In a virtual world, people can navigate a conference or other live event through a 3-D experience that enables them to interact with others via avatars."

While Guitar Hero makes you a rock star and Nintendo’s Wii Sports plants you on a tennis court or baseball diamond, Second Life has evolved from a purely social site to a valuable resource for businesses. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory provided real-time video of the May 2008 Phoenix spacecraft landing on Mars, the Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program simulates disaster preparedness and response activities, and the University of Denver teaches students about weather with real-time data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

CSC, meanwhile, conducted a pilot with Qwaq Forums, designed specifically for secure business collaboration and learning behind the firewall. Used in tandem with e-mail, phone, wikis, IM and telepresence, Qwaq Forums allows users to collaborate in real time, editing documents and moving virtually from room to room.

Social Power
Research used to be an arduous process involving trips to the library, voluminous reference books and time-consuming microfiche. Today, however, says Fuss, "We have the unprecedented ability to find the experts and people we want to work with no matter where they are in the world, and we can bring that ability to bear as we share ideas and solve problems more quickly than ever before."

While companies are understandably wary of security breaches inherent in social networking sites, the report argues that organizations need to explore and leverage social power for their own benefit. "In an interconnected world, who you know, and more importantly, who your colleagues and friends know, matters." Secure social networking solutions for the enterprise are emerging so organizations can tap social power responsibly.

VirginMoneyUS.com is one example of how social power is changing the financial landscape. A peer-to-peer lending site created by CSC, VirginMoneyUS.com provides real estate, personal, education and business loans between family and friends. "Enterprises are earnestly attempting to leverage social power, both internally among employees and externally in business strategies," according to Digital Disruptions.

Information Transparency
As the marketplace has expanded globally, so too has our access to it, with a simple Internet connection acting as a portal to vast amounts of information, coupled with uncompromising transparency.

"If someone goes to a hotel in Ohio or Paris," says Fuss, "and takes a picture with their cell phone camera of the broken tile in the bathroom and shares that with the rest of the world, the hotel cannot hide the fact that they have poor maintenance." The hotel must either improve its maintenance or lose business to its competition. "What is observed by one will be known to all," the report asserts.

Enterprise visibility refers to the ability to ’see’ all of an organization’s assets. In Australia, BHP Billiton’s Cannington Mine uses Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) to manage traffic movement — the first time this technology has been operational underground.

Above ground, digital surveillance, including GPS and sensors on trucks, keeps track of how many hours truck drivers are at the wheel, thereby ensuring nobody drives more hours than federal law allows. In June 2008, CSC introduced OmniLocation, integrating location and sensor technology with Web Services to create a real world visualization of enterprise operations. And, with an estimated annual 44,000 to 98,000 deaths in U.S. hospitals due to medical errors, CSC’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Wah argues for transparent health care, whereby electronic health records — one of several key technology enablers — become standard procedure.

New Wave of Waves
"Imagine a day when your mobile phone works on any wireless network, not just your carrier’s network," says the report, "or emergency responders can carry one radio that communicates with firefighters, police, federal emergency responders, the National Guard and others seamlessly and reliably."

Even moving vehicles are going wireless, with planes, trains and automobiles connecting to the Internet. Thalys International is now offering six million passengers per year Internet access aboard their high-speed trains, the first European commercial passenger rail service to do so.

As our world becomes more and more connected, business is quickly evolving toward mobile markets, while entertainment can be tailored toward individual preferences.

Platform Makeover
With our increasing expectation to be able to access our work products from anywhere and share them with anyone at anytime, the computing platform naturally shifts toward more virtualization and cloud computing. Centralizing data center resources on the Internet — the cloud — is a radical departure from business-as-usual servers owned and operated inside enterprise walls.

In Green IT: Moving Beyond the 2% Solution, CSC’s LEF Executive Programme shares the results of a Study Tour that visited 17 different companies, concluding that, in order to remain competitive, businesses must become more environmentally aware.

One of the most significant platform disruptions will arrive with quantum computing — computing based on the spin of electrons (rather than their charge) that is orders of magnitude faster than any current processor. Although general purpose quantum computing is still in the research phase, work is underway to leverage the unique properties of currently buildable quantum devices to solve complex commercial problems by exploring many alternatives quickly. For example, quantum can be applied to important logistics applications such as package delivery, where the problem of optimizing which packages go on which planes using which routes to minimize time and fuel must be solved today within an hour. Quantum would do it in minutes or even seconds.

Smart(er) World
Get ready for a smart(er) technology landscape that includes avatars that not only understand language but can also reason.

"As more business is done online and consumers seek a personal experience, avatars will be the only way to handle growth and provide individual attention," says the report. Businesses will create their own avatars to act as virtual assistants responding to customer inquiries via text chat or voice, with just one avatar answering millions of questions at the same time.

With Web 3.0, commonly referred to as the Semantic Web, the Internet shifts from word-centric to meaning-centric computing. Next up is Web 4.0, which promises automated reasoning.

Though we are currently facing economic woes, digital disruptions will help world gross domestic product flourish in the 21st century, much as industrial disruptions did in the 19th century. According to New York University pundit Clay Shirky, progress is not made in a straight line. When disruptions arrive, they typically take us from current business model A to a somewhat chaotic state, before taking us to new and improved business model B.

"We are at the stage where digital disruptions are leading us temporarily into expected chaos," says Fuss. "It will take a decade or two to sort out, but we will move through chaos to B. Ever the optimist, I think we will end up in a better place."