Happy New Year

May 2018 be a better year for you and all of those you hold dear. Stay close to your loved ones and pray for good health. May you be granted all the good things you desire in 2018. I hope to share ideas with all those who pursue digital outcomes.

Top10 Digtial Trends for 2018

2018 is a pivotal year for organizations going digital. Since organizations have had a long gestation period and a number of  years for experimentation. there better be implementation of action plans. 2018 promises to be a year of action and extraordinary change. There will be new ways of working, new habits,  new technologies and new challenges. This is a people challenge as well as an organizational challenge. Nobody is exempt.

Digital Accelerates:

2018 is the year of doing digital. While planning and experimenting with digital was important and will continue in the background, this is the time for delivering real organizational  and personal outcomes. Understanding where digital is gaining traction and applying it for results will be the theme for 2018. Success will breed success in 2018, so getting started quickly will be more important this year than ever before to continue momentum. 

Customers are Everything:

For obvious cost and revenue reasons keeping customers loyal is crucial. The emphasis on customer experience completed in the most delightful way while optimizing a balance between operational efficiency and customer satisfaction is the goal for digital organizations. Outcomes that revolve around customer, employee and partner satisfaction is the end game of digital done right. The ideal is for customers to have a customized interactions in order to maintain relations for life.

Automate It Baby:

Organizations will focus on automating low skill tasks and jobs by adding smarts and processes that can deal with emerging conditions and contexts. As more success occurs, higher level of jobs will be impacted by automation or automated assists. Operations will become leaner because fewer workers will be needed to do the same work. Human insight will still dominate for generalized work, but savings are ripe for the picking. 

Make AI Real & Democratized:

Augmented intelligence will become the most important step towards full A/I. There will be a new collaboration between people, machines and software that is aimed finding important patterns, make complicated decisions and take appropriate actions as fast as possible. Augmented intelligence will become popular because of the benefits that people will experience through extending their intelligence. This will build confidence for A/I to become more autonomous and pervasive. 

Industrial Cloud Dominates:

Cloud will no longer be just an operational destination to create presence and reduce cost. Cloud will provide a level of security and intelligence that organizations will not likely deliver on their own. Right now there is a lot of momentum for private cloud. but the temptation of an intelligent and secure cloud will move more organizations to a more public presence. 

Software Eats the Cloud:

While the cloud will become more potent, it is an operational platform and does not allow of organizational differentiation provided by unique business models, processes/applications or customer experiences. Overtime the cloud will become commodity and the war will be on price. This means that the software that resides on the cloud will make the real differences for organizations and individuals. 

Deliver on Data:

It make no difference if the data is big, fast or dark, organizations will start delivering on the value of the data they actually have. While IoT and emerging processes will greatly contribute to the volume and speed of data, just gathering data will not be good enough. Finding the bright spots in the mostly dark data for operation improvement and customer care will be the focus. 

Eliminate Speed Limits:

The speed to action will become a key differentiators for both product/service design as well as responses to customers. employees and partners. This means that the speed to sensing will be key even if there is no IoT contribution to the process or application. IoT will add more of the need for speed and the ability to absorb complicated patterns of sense and respond. This will put an emphasis faster decisions and actions. 

Context is Everything:

Knowing the how to respond is one thing, but understanding the effect of the response in context is quite different and important. This is particularly important when the context is new and emergent or the combination of contexts might change the response. This is why human and A/I judgment needs policies, rules and constraints to keep responses proper for the situation. Proper management and governance to guide interaction is a key consideration. 

Action at the Edge: 

There is a trend to take action  closer to where the patterns are sensed. This means that a pure centralized control model will not add as much value as breaking down large processes and applications into micro services and process snippets that reside at the edge to sense and respond close to where the event occurred. Quite often this is at the edge, closer to customers and controllers/sensors where decisions and actions can occur with high levels of freedom.

Net; Net:

The proof of digital will show up in a big way in 2018 and will lay the foundation for years to come. Organizations have money to invest into new digital directions and digital skills. 2018 will be the year that many organizations will point to as a turning point up or down. Digital will make the difference, but we will have to learn how to properly combine these trends productively over time. 

Attracting the Digitally Skilled

Like it or not, your organization is in a battle to attract people that have or can quickly grow digtial skills. How do you stack the deck in your favor in a world that is well informed? The best resources for digital growth are young fresh minds, but they are not easily fooled nor are they going to trust your organization or the word in your sales pitches. Folks with potential digital prowess will leverage digital resources well. They can easily determine your real culture by checking Ladders, Glassdoor, and Linkedin. They can talk with people that know about the reality of your organization through social media. They will not go on faith like previous generations. What can you do to attract them?

Show Them Likely Career Progression Opportunities:

The digitally savvy want to know how they can quickly grow into more reward and responsibitlity. This means that you have to have documented and proven paths to success for them. While they will be committed to your business/organizational outcomes, they want you to be committed to their desired outcomes when they deliver the goods. They do not trust companies and they have more choices than ever.


Show Them Your Fun Facilites:

The digitally savvy will be working around the clock at times and will be focused on speedy delivery. They want facilities, games, easy accesses to good food and drink. They want fun events, games and opportunities for interactions. Your facility will be a home away from home, so show them that you are committed to pleasing them.


Show Them Training Opportunities: 

These folks want to keep learning and growing, so they are not satisfiefd with organizations tapping their skills for just money. They want to grow and get better for themselves first which will likely benefit the organization they work for at the moment. Your organization had better have lots of learning opportunities that go beyond learning on the job.

Net; Net:

Ths young people have seen organizations back away from supporting workers for a life time and have accepted their own responsibility for their own development and financial success. This means your organization better be ready to partner with them to this end.


Additional Reading: 

Digital Skills in Demand

Approaches to Finding Digital Skills

Happy Holidays to Everyone

We wish you the best of the holiday season this year. We, at the Sinur home. celebrate Gods gift to us this Christmas in his Son. We especially count our many blessings this time of year. We hope you have a great holiday season and enjoy your loved ones :) 

Skill Yourself Digital Now

It is important to have yourself prepared to participate well in the digital world where speed of upgrade is essential. The first step is to identify the top skills that organizations are likely to want. The second step would be to select the skills that best match your passion and abilities. The third step is to decide to be proactive in acquiring those skills. Since few organizations today are investing getting their people to a participating digital level, you are pretty much on your own. If you happen to work for an organization that invests in people, take full advantage of any education and training you can get. If you don't maybe it's time to change jobs. In any event, you are likely to have to aggressively pursue skills on your own. You are in charge of your own digital transformation!!

TOP DIGITAL SKILLS:                          

Business Skills: 

Strategy & Planning

These skills revolve around creating mater plans and designing the measurements and operations to get to the desired outcomes. This usually means establishing policies, action plans and key performance indicators.

Digital Product Creation & Ownership

This involves skills related to oversight and development of new online products or services from inception to delivery.  Using result data, manage improvements to enhance the digital product or service.

Digital Content Creation & Marketing

This form of marketing is focused on creating, publishing and distributing digital content such as videos, podcasts, infographics, social media and blogs for a target audience. This content is often used to attract and generate leads for future customers while increasing brand awareness or credibility

Business / Technical Skills:

Digital Experience Design

Designing compelling interactions for people is essential for digital success. Focusing on journeys and persona's while optimizing the touch points for both people and the organization is an essential suite of skills.

New Wave Analytics

Applying the most useful analytics to big and fast data is essential to outflank competitors and intercept key trends. These "aha moments"allow for better decisions and actions that get to better outcomes.

Agile Project Management / SCRUM

Project management involves planning, executing, controlling and finishing the work of a team to achieve specific deliverables within time and quality specifications. Iterative and sandbox like methods are popular in digital efforts.


Next Generation Machine Learning

AI requires changes in managing projects, process and applications. Teaching machines to learn is one area of concentration, but guiding and improving truly intelligent and agile systems that can self change will be at the edge of digital

Technical Skills:

Full Stack Architecture

Because the rapidly changing and complex technology landscape, architecture is shifting to include fluency across all technology components that support digital efforts in development and operations,

Programming & DevOps

This involves new digital development models, languages and scripting languages to support rapid development and agile digital solutions. With the advent of cloud computing and agile infrastructure, the configuration and programming skills necessary to optimize operations will be in great demand.

Systems Administrators

The ability to manage the care and feeding of IT infrastructures, processes and applications will be in short supply. This is especially true in highly distributed organizations with local resources.

Net; Net: 

If you want to excel in the new digital age, you will need to develop a plan for yourself and assertively execute on a plan to become a great digital resource in your areas of interest and abilities. This means you search for resources online and consume as many videos, follow key blogs, link to great social resources and even read key digital books.  The ball is in your court, so step up and strike it.


Additional Competency Related Posts:

Corporate Skill Acquisition
Top Corporate Digital Competencies
Digital Planning