Will You be the Disruptor or the Disrupted in 2019?

Did you know that 52 percent of Fortune 500 firms since 2000 have gone out of business? That’s according to Ray Wang, principal analyst and chairman at Constellation Research, a technology advisory firm in Silicon Valley.

Whether you’re a laggard, fast follower or market leader, you know digital transformation is vital to the success of your enterprise business. Yet digital transformation needs more than just technology - it requires a radical shift in how an organization thinks about and applies data to drive innovation and positively impact the business.

Data is the Fuel that Powers Digital Transformation

“Companies are battling for customer experiences in today’s on-demand, attention economy, and not surprisingly, those experiences all require data,” adds Wang.

Teams want to be able to make better decisions with data, at speed, for various initiatives across the enterprise. The data and information received from every touch point, click and digital exhaust is relevant insight that allows companies to engage and identify the next best action for consumers, enabling personalization at scale.

“Organizations need to leverage a data platform that brings agility and continuous innovation to the entire enterprise in order to build and deliver a modern brand experience for customers,” Wang explains.

Digital Business Models Create a Winner-Takes-All-Market

Take Domino’s Pizza for example. While Dominos isn’t known as the poster child for innovation, Dominos was the first pizza chain to debut an online pizza tracker and build an ingenious product to allow customers to put in their orders through their preferred platform, including Apple TV, Google Home, Amazon Echo, Ford Sync, Facebook Messenger, Slack, smartwatches and other emerging technology. As a result, mobile has driven half of their digital sales, with digital sales contributing the majority of overall sales, according to Domino’s SVP of eCommerce Development and Emerging Technologies Kelly Garcia in Forbes.

They’ve managed to turn around their business by shifting their mindset to think like a tech company and relentlessly focus on taking a mobile-first approach with a “powerfully responsive experience.” It was only just a few years ago when they were struggling to compete with Pizza Hut. Fast forward to 2019, Domino’s is winning the pizza wars and is one the hottest performing stocks since 2010.

Managing Risk and Security at the Speed of Digital Innovation

Today, the fast eat the flow. In a world where businesses compete and succeed on the basis of application-driven innovation, companies must deliver high quality software at a fast pace or risk being disrupted by their competition. Cyber threats are also on the rise as more and more companies fall victim to data breaches, along with the slew of privacy regulations coming into play to better protect consumer data.

Oftentimes, businesses are forced to lock down data to secure sensitive data, even though they realize data is key to unlocking competitive advantage. This act creates a lengthy and tedious process of managing access and limits the availability of crucial test data in the development cycle, slowing down innovation.

Modern enterprises need to approach data in a way, where they can balance the speed of innovation with a strong security strategy. The true cost of a data breach may vary from business to business but so does the risk of not moving fast enough.