NO MATTER WHAT BUSINESS YOU’RE IN—clothing, health care, transportation—you need to start thinking of your company as a digital one, says Venkat Venkatraman. The David J. McGrath Jr. Professor in Management, who has advised IBM, BP, Ericsson, Merck, and many others, is the author of The Digital Matrix: New Rules for Business Transformation Through Technology (LifeTree Media, 2017). In the book, he shows companies how to create new business models and partnerships around digital technology. “Digital technology,” writes Venkatraman, also a professor of information systems and strategy & innovation, “is critical to every industry and every company, including yours.” Here are his exclusive tips for Everett readers:

EVERETT: WHAT’S YOUR GOAL WITH THE DIGITAL MATRIX?

Venkatraman: The main reason I wrote the book was there are a lot of managers that went through business schools in the 1990s, and even the early 2000s, that really didn’t have much exposure to why they should think about information technology differently from the past. It‘s easy to look at IT as a very specialized function that can be delegated while the middle managers and senior managers worry about business.

But if you look at the last seven, eight years, you realize that there are companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft that not only produce information technology products, but are also starting to influence the way we live, work, and play, or the way we learn and innovate and transact. They actively shape what’s happening in different industries. Apple is a player in telecommunications and music. Google is no longer just about search; it could be a major player in the future of the automotive industry.

I saw these digital giants, as they’re called in the book, as becoming an important influence on every industry, whether retail or pharmaceutical or health care or financial services. So I really wanted the book to be a wake-up call for executives in traditional businesses who may not have thought about the pervasiveness of digitization. In the next five to seven years, these digital giants will influence strategies of organizations, and my book is really to get traditional businesses to recognize that and start responding systematically—failing which, they’ll go the way of BlackBerry and Nokia.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.bu.edu