Cleve Gibbon

As I was clearing out my computer over the Christmas break I stumbled across these images that literally blew my mind. In 1956, it took an army of people, planes, trains, and automobiles to transport 5Mb storage from one location to another. Today, it would take 200,000 of those monster drives to hold the same amount of data as a $100 1Tb SSD disk the size of your fingertip. Thankfully, only a thousand IBM 305 RAMAC systems were built and sold for $160,000 in 195 (that’s $1.3m today’s money). A textbook example of digital innovation: dematerialize (make smaller), demonetize (make cheaper), and democratize (make accessible).

So, storage is cheap, commoditized, and cloud-based. Digitization has successfully pulled vast amounts of data from across the enterprise and consolidated it onto various digital media formats held on smart storage solutions. Digital transformation has helped make data accessible everywhere.

However, we are still evolving. We are now entering the Intelligent transformation era. Making data accessible useful and useable requires understanding. Hence, the increased focus on artificial intelligence and data science to accelerate gleaning insights from data. In doing so, we can scale making smarter and faster decisions with confidence.

Really looking forward to what humans and technology will accomplish together in 2021, with the right focus.

We are living in a digital world.  Every organisation is going through a digital transformation today to stay relevant and be competitive.  The smartest organisations are not going it alone. They enlist help to fill  expertise gaps and bring in experience to accelerate them on their digital transformation journey.  This help comes in the form of agencies and consultancies that have ‘done it before‘.  However, are digital transformation partners themselves transforming?

It is not the strongest of the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change – Charles Darwin

Late last year I attended a digital marketing event where a major global brand in the financial sector asked the agencies in the audience, are YOU transforming too?  The presenter went on and listed a few things they look for from an agency to help them.  We’ll get back to those.  But first, his organisation clearly manages a large ecosystem  of agencies and consultancies.  With everyone one of them offering up experience and expertise to do better in a digital world.  How can he differentiate between them?

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