Image by Dave Catchpole via Wikimedia Commons

As I get older, every year seems to fly by just a little bit faster than the year before.  Jumbled up in my blurry memory of 2012: Facebeook went public, a rover landed on Mars, London hosted the Olympics, Austin lost a local icon, the northeast weathered Hurricane Sandy, the US reelected a president, and my son is about to turn four.  Just to single out a few events at random.

As in life, so too in business.  When it comes to digital technology, the rate of  innovation, consumer adoption, and cultural transformation is only accelerating – not plateauing.  My job gives me a window into the inner workings of many large corporations, where numerous change initiatives, replatformings, and transformational roadmaps are underway.  My general impression is that these efforts are essential but not sufficient.  Technology giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.), Silicon Valley startups, and consumers themselves are moving faster still.  “Traditional” companies must find ways to accelerate innovation, or risk losing share to nimbler competitors or purveyors of disruptive substitutes with digital in their DNA.

What I see is an increasingly wide chasm between consumer technology companies and consumers themselves, on the one hand, and well-established “traditional” product and service companies on the other.  Call it a “digital innovation gap”.  Outside the world of consumer high-tech, many large companies are still wrestling with digital challenges first identified 5-10 years ago.  For example:  eCommerce checkout flows.  Content targeting.  Social listening.  Video.  These capabilities should by now be considered foundational, not leading edge.  But legacy systems, policies, and org structures make it difficult for non-digital companies to achieve parity – even when best practices are well documented and widely understood – let alone leadership-level capabilities.

Meanwhile, consumers and their favorite technology providers continue to advance.  Their near-term agenda includes mobile payments, apps that work seamlessly across devices, the “personal cloud” to store and sync data, location information and other contextual data, connected “things” (i.e., other than phones), real-time video communications, and soon enough: wearable computing.  It’s hard to innovate along these dimensions if you’re still trying to figure out how big your “Buy now!” button should be.  In fact, one ironic consequence of the capability gap between consumers and corporations is the fact that consumers’ personal devices and applications are often more sophisticated than those provided to them by their corporate employers.

As a strategy consultant, I’m less interested in specific technology choices (Atlas vs. DART, Google Wallet vs. Isis, etc.) than with helping companies build the capabilities required to move quicker and change faster.  This usually involves new platforms, sure, but also new teams, new budgets, new metrics, new rules.  Change is hard.  Rapid, effective change is harder still.

To give a sense of how digital innovation might play out across non-digital sectors, here are some broad-stroke thought-starters:

• For retailers: Digital technology can and should enhance multiple facets of the in-store experience: self-service, shopper marketing, product merchandising, associate interactions, checkout, loyalty, price promotions, etc.  Eventually all of these elements will be digitized in some way, and the store will become “smart”.  Just as a consumer with a smartphone is empowered in multiple ways, a digitally empowered “smart store” will deliver a much more effective and engaging retail experience.

• For manufacturers: Whether your product is a car or a box of cereal, it will soon become the norm for your category to deliver a value-added, software-based “interactive experience” component above and beyond the physical product itself.  Nike+ is an early example of this; so is Kellogg’s “My Special K” online toolkit for weight loss and management.  Engaging, useful, “always on” experiences like these usually start out as experiments in digital brand marketing; eventually they become a core component of the brand value proposition itself.  As experiences evolve to become even richer and more useful, they will influence consumers’ purchase decisions as much as – or even more than – the characteristics of the underlying physical product itself.

• For service providers: From insurance to travel, banking to education, digital technology is transforming how services are marketed and delivered.  This broad sector is a hotbed of startup activity, especially in less capital-intensive industries.  The potential to use digital as both a transaction and delivery channel creates avenues for new competitors to circumvent traditional barriers to entry.  (Just ask the music and newspaper industries.)  So if you’re not thinking about how to disrupt and supplant your existing business model – before somebody else does – perhaps you should be.  And even in industries where barriers to entry remain high (e.g. banking, airlines), digital models for customer service are so important to consumers, they can have a huge impact on the relative performance of traditional competitors and ultimately determine winners and losers over the long term.

One consistent theme across all three sectors is the importance of software development capabilities, to support the creation of valuable new digital experiences.  Marketers have been told for years that they must start to behave like content publishers, or like newsrooms: gathering, disseminating, and reacting to information in near-real time.  Well, surprise: even that capability is no longer enough.  You must also be able to imagine, build and optimize interactive experiences that function and deliver value across a range of devices and platforms – much like a Silicon Valley internet company.  And the skill sets and mindsets required for success might be quite foreign indeed to your current organization.

So that’s what this blog will be about: how to build the skills and capabilities required to succeed in a digitally empowered, globally interconnected age.  My “wanderings” have given me a chance to pull back the curtain and see how different types of organizations are grappling with these challenges – in search of growth, performance, and long-term competitive advantage.  As I work with them and learn from them, I’ll occasionally share general observations and random musings here.

And if you ever feel inclined to comment on my wandering prose, I would love to hear your thoughts as well.  Wander on!