Last year I had the opportunity to do a course on digital disruption with Cambridge University. It was funded by Campbell Park Parish Council where I serve as a Ward Councillor.
One of the first things the lecturer said was that the old ways of describing organisations as ‘industries’ was now redundant and that we now need to look at organisations within eco systems and networks.
The course described the ability of organisations to survive and harness digital disruption as a tool which would empower and change the way businesses and organisations are run and how they succeed in the future.
A few months later we are in the midst of COVID 19 and digitisation is not just a disrupter but becomes the only option for many organisations and businesses.
Organisations not used to using digital technology now find themselves forced to innovate to communicate and work digitally.
Business and individual entrepreneurs started to pivot and innovate, using digitisation not as the disrupter but as an enabler for different, new, innovating and exciting ways of doing things, creating new networks and eco systems to grow and sustain their businesses. For many the new scary virtual world was thrust on them and they had to tiptoe into and find their way around it trying to hold on to handles which would allow them to navigate the vastness of this space.
For others the vastness of this space provided the opportunities to elevate, to explore and to reinvent.
I would suggest that just as my lecturer called the ‘term ‘industries’ ‘redundant’, so the term ‘digital disruption’ has become ‘redundant’. COVID 19 was the disruption we did not foresee but digitisation is now the enabler, the facilitator, the space which will allow us to create our new way of working, our new ways of connecting.
Digitisation is a world we have entered and we can never go back. We must embrace it without fear and harness its power for the good it can do.
Of course one cannot write a piece without a nod to those who will wish to highlight all the evil that is possible in this new and exciting virtual world. But all of that evil is also possible outside it. Like everyone else the crooks will also innovate, but this cannot stop what you and I MUST do.
Because the clarion cry ‘innovate or die’ has never been louder than at this present time.