Leading enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities; the ‘perfect storm’ of technology, demographic, and market changes is forcing businesses to re-evaluate their value in the post-millennial reality. Access to new cloud platforms has lowered the barrier to entry for new start-ups from millions to thousands of euros to launch a service. This, combined with the ubiquity of mobile usage as the primary method of consumption of media and communications, has already dramatically revolutionized industries such as media, news, retail, and CPG, among others, and has not always favored the incumbent market leaders.
For large, successful organizations, this translates into two strategic trends that are inextricably linked and will happen in parallel: ‘digital transformation’ and ‘refreshing the core.’ These potentially have such different dynamics that there is, at best, tension between them, and, at worst, a risk one or both could constrain an organization’s ability to compete in its market because IT has become a nexus of failure rather than a driver of change.
