The world is being transformed by new technologies, which are redefining customer expectations, enabling businesses to meet these new expectations, and changing the way people live and work. Digital transformation, as this is commonly called, has immense potential to change consumer lives, create value for business and unlock broader societal benefits.
Dave Page CEO at Actual Experience plc (LON: ACT) told DirectorsTalk:
“The World Economic Forum say digital transformation will unlock $100 trillion for business and society, but this relies on the global digital supply chains working properly. Currently they are variable and inconsistent, which means that $100tr is hope rather than expectation.”
The World Economic Forum launched the Digital Transformation Initiative in 2015, in collaboration with Accenture, to serve as the focal point for new opportunities and themes arising from the latest developments in the digitalization of business and society. It supports the Forum’s broader activity around the theme of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Since its inception, the Initiative has analysed the impact of digital transformation across 13 industries and five cross-industry topics, to identify the key themes that enable the value generated by digitalization to be captured for business and wider society. Drawing on these themes, we have developed a series of imperatives for business and policy leaders that look to maximize the benefits of digitalization. We have engaged with more than 300 executives (both from leading global firms and newer technology disruptors), government and policy leaders, and academics.
Every industry has its nuances and contextual differences, but they all share certain inhibitors to change. These include the innovator’s dilemma (the fear of cannibalizing existing revenue models), low technology adoption rates across organizations, conservative organizational cultures, and regulatory issues. Business and government leaders should continue to work towards addressing these challenges.
A notable outcome of this work is the development of our distinctive economic framework, which quantifies the impact of digitalization on industry and society. It can be applied consistently at all levels of business and government to help unlock the estimated $100 trillion of value that digitalization could create over the next decade. We have already started to leverage this framework for region-specific discussions with some governments.
We are confident that the findings from the Initiative will contribute to improving the state of the world through digital transformation, both for business and wider society.
Actual Experience’s analytics provide the digital Voice of the Customer. This is a real-time, data-driven view of what end users would say about the quality of a company’s digital products and services, and why. Our customers can analyse everything that impacts the experience quality in their digital supply chains, for any service, type of user or the Internet of Things. It gives them complete transparency from the point of provision to the point of use and whether inside or outside their business’s control. The insights can be used to make continuous improvements to their business performance.
