I've updated the website. Let me know if you want me to resend an updated email

For nearly two hours I’ve been agonising whether I should send another email to let you know that I do know how to count and that I just made a quick editing mistake and had 10 items in the list and not 9 as the text suggested. 🤦‍♂️

I’ve fixed it on the website, but if you’d prefer the updated version by email I’d be more than happy to resend it if you request. 👍

This is what I thought of immediately after spotting the error:

Cleveland: Well what on earth does that mean?

Chapman: I don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)

W(The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain (Palin) enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles (Jones) has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang (Gilliam) is just Cardinal Fang)

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our four...no... Amongst our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again. (Exit and exeunt)

Chapman: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)

(The cardinals burst in)

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn! (To Cardinal Biggles) I can't say it - you'll have to say it.

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/spanish.php

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interesting in learning about Digital Transformation and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

Sign up now

Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

Apple’s correction course — undoing poor design decisions and ignoring theory

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I’m a little late getting this one out the door, having not written an update last week at all. My apologies. Life got in the way, preventing me from taking the time to sit down, research and write the email. It’s a long process and demands a lot of concentration-time, something that is increasingly difficult to find for good reasons. Truth be told, I’d been working on several projects concurrently and hadn’t gouged time in the week to produce something of quality. Ho-hum. I’ll do better next time.

One to the update.

The new MacBook Pro, CAST data and Outcome-Driven Innovation

Image: Apple Inc.

Six days ago, Apple Inc. announced and released a new redesign to its venerable workhorse, the MacBook Pro. This release shows us why the Jobs-to-be-Done theory is so critical and so powerful when we use its potential in business decisions.

First, a little history about the MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Pro started life in 2006 when Apple transitioned its entire line of computers from the PowerPC processor platform to Intel. The transition was a big deal and was expertly managed, providing current users with a sustainable upgrade path and new users the ability to run existing PowerPC-based applications with the need to purchase upgrades or other things to continue their work. The transition worked so well with specifically, a high-quality PowerPC emulation, that some argued that it slowed potential sales of the new laptop devices that Apple renamed as the MacBook Pro. On the PowerPC platform, they were referred to as PowerBooks. Interestingly, Apple did two things with the name change; they differentiated the old from the new with a new strand of computers names, and at the same time disassociated the name of the laptops with the processor family, having been burnt with the slow evolution of IBM’s PowerPC. It would never happen again.

The MacBook Pro gained popularity in the pro-market reasonably quickly and eventually became one of Apple’s best-selling computers to the general public, despite its high-end pricing. The MacBook Pro became “the” computer to own. It could do everything. It was as fast as a desktop; it was portable and had a decent battery life for a device as mobile as it was.

It exuded quality and attention to detail in its design. It was a joy to use and offered a breath of fresh air to users who had bought one instead of a standard corp-type laptop from the period. From a hardware perspective, it had two simultaneous stand-out features that no other notebook had at the time, a near-perfect trackpad and an excellent keyboard. Some had decent, and in some circumstances, great keyboards (ThinkPad anyone?) and there were a couple with a half-decent trackpad, none had both.

Subsequent revisions and evolutions to the MacBook Pro brought lighter, thinner laptops and a new design debuted in 2008 using a single slab of Aluminium to carve out the shell of the notebook, baptised Unibody by Apple. This design enabled a slew of innovations as the electronics could be better fit into the chassis with better reliability due to its robust structure. IT gained widescreen, a larger trackpad. All advances that responded to the wants and needs of the professional class and general users alike. The designs pushed the envelope and allowed Apple to gain significantly its market-share of portable computers sold worldwide.

Outcomes drove design decisions, and the sales figures and customer satisfaction statistics confirmed this. Apple has consistently been top of the list for Personal Computers in the American Customer Satisfaction Index since 2004 with a score of 83 out of 100. What Apple was practising was, in fact, Outcome-Driven Innovation.

Jobs-to-be-Done theory

Jobs-to-be-Done theory started life called “Outcome-Driven Innovation” and funnily-enough, was a theory developed out of a disaster experienced by IBM when they tried to create a new type of PC market with a computer that few will remember, the PCjr.

IBM’s PCjr was marketed by IBM for just over one year, March 1984 to May 1985, and shipped a terrible quantity of just 500000 units. Remember, shipped units have nothing to do with “Sold numbers, and IBM had only managed to sell around 250000 units by January 1985. It was an embarrassment for IBM and would hold back their production of home-oriented computers by nearly five years when they introduced the PS/1.

Tony Ulwick, who was on IBM’s product team as an engineer, wondered how, when the PCjr was announced, why the press were able to predict that the computer would flop accurately. He asked if they used data and metrics to evaluate the chances of success or failure and if those metrics were right or not. After several months he came up with a hypothesis:

“It seemed to me that if a product team could know what metrics its customers were going to use to judge its new offering well in advance of product development, it could design the product to address those metrics and predictably deliver a winning solution.”

The hypothesis generated many complex questions like what metrics? Captured how, by whom, when?

The answer to these questions and others eventually led to Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). ODI was subsequently tested outside IBM in 1991:

“… to help Cordis Corporation introduce a new line of angioplasty balloons. This led to a dramatic increase in market share (from about 1% to over 20%) and was the first of many successes.”

Clayton Christensen published the first edition, of what became a hugely influential book, The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. Soon after Tony Ulwick presented his recently developed and tested ideas, ODI, as a solution to the issues outlined in Christensen’s book. The Innovator’s Solution first published in 2003, described how ODI could be used by businesses to develop and market innovations that would respond directly to the jobs that people were trying to perform, alternatively called, jobs to be done. The book renamed ODI as Jobs-to-be-Done Theory.

Theories are nothing more than a set of principles or beliefs that are proffered to help explain things that have already been observed with data. A huge sales increase in one line of products compared to another is found, then a theory is derived to try and explain why, with the aim to repeat that success for a new product line. Jobs-to-be-Done theory is no different; the original data was a tank in sales of a newly introduced computer with an approach developed, ODI, that was corroborated by its use in a completely different context. Jobs-to-be-Done Theory attempts to explain how we can make innovation more predictable, something I’m sure many businesses would love to do, particularly in the digital context of today’s markets.

The theory describes nine beliefs as the way to start to develop predictable growth:

1. People buy products and services to get a “job” done.

2. Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components.

3. A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time.

4. A Job-to-be-Done is solution agnostic.

5. Success comes from making the “job”, rather than the product or the customer, the unit of analysis.

6. A deep understanding of the customer’s “job” makes marketing more effective and innovation far more predictable.

7. People want products and services that will help them get a job done better and/or more cheaply

8. People seek out products and services that enable them to get the entire job done on a single platform

9. Innovation becomes predictable when “needs” are defined as the metrics customers use to measure success when getting the job done

Understanding these brings insights into a company or department, fostering better innovation development.

Looking at each of these beliefs through the lens of the MacBook Pro, we can see how Apple may have used this theory to design one of the best computers money can buy.

The Jobs-to-be-Done of the MacBook Pro

When people buy a product or a service, they do so to get a “job” done. In the case of the MacBook Pro there are hundreds, possibly thousands of jobs to be done. Photographers need to edit their photos. Filmmakers need to produce their works and podcasters need to record, edit and upload the next episode from a hotel room. But there are many other jobs that need fulfilling, those of office workers needing to have a good screen and portability to take around to the various meetings in the buildings in which they work. Nothing new here and nothing the previous generations couldn’t do. But there was one job that was fulfilled by early generations that got ignored or simply excluded because it wasn’t deemed necessary, that of the writer needing to type on the laptop for hours per day, reliably.

When Apple introduced the 4th generation 13” and 15” models, Apple declared proudly that they had redesigned the keyboard, inaugurating a new butterfly mechanism that replaced the long-running scissor mechanism. It was universally panned and soon after there are lots of reports about the keyboard’s reliability, or lack thereof. Apple doubled down, eventually producing three versions of the butterfly keyboard that was said to be more reliable. But the problem wasn’t just the reliability. It was also the experience of using the keyboard. Some liked it — personally, I’m indifferent — and others hated it.

Which is where the second belief applies. Emotional and social components are sometimes more important than the functional ones. Many non-professionals used MacBook Pros to have or to show they had Apple’s latest and greatest, is both emotional and social Apple nailed the JTBD. However, many professionals publicly slammed the keyboard because the emotional experience of typing on it for long periods was sub-optimal. The emotional component was not being catered for, in this instance.

We note that the Jobs-to-be-Done was stable over time, sales figures and the uses of the MacBook Pro tend to agree with this, but the danger for Apple was the fourth belief; it is solution agnostic. There were many rumours and many YouTube videos of pros and amateurs alike, looking at moving to other brands’s laptops to get their work done, despite leaving the very-agreeable world of macOS.

I’m guessing Apple will see a significant uptick in the sales of this new generation, aligning to the fifth belief; the “job” is the unit of analysis and not the product. A better experience will inevitably lead to better sales. Particularly for a cohort of already-onboard fans and professionals. Leading neatly to the sixth belief, centred around marketing, looking at Apple’s newsroom page announcing the MacBook Pro, there it is in the first sentence of the second paragraph:

“Featuring a new Magic Keyboard with a redesigned scissor mechanism and 1mm travel for a more satisfying key feel, the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers the best typing experience ever in a Mac notebook.

Third paragraph (emphasis mine):

“Our pro customers tell us they want their next MacBook Pro to have a larger display, blazing-fast performance, the biggest battery possible, the best notebook keyboard ever, awesome speakers and massive amounts of storage, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers all of that and more,” said Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing. 

Belief seven is targeted in the fact that new MacBook Pro is squarely aimed at getting more work done, easier and faster on one device (belief 8). I think we can expect more marketing (which is just an expression of the data being collected about the Jobs-to-be-Done) about how the new model is saving/enhancing/fulfilling lives of its users. Apple will use the poor feedback from previous the generations’ to better design the future.

For what it’s worth, my entire business was built using this theory. In nearly a year of business, meeting potential clients, I haven’t had a single remark from an owner that my services are not something they want or need. It is unanimously positive and responds almost entirely to what businesses are seeking for in help and guidance on Digital Transformation.

I thank Tony Ulwick and his article on Medium that first exposed the theory to me: https://jobs-to-be-done.com/the-5-tenets-of-jobs-to-be-done-theory-ba58c3a093c1

The Future is Digital is intended for anyone interesting in learning about Digital Transformation and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

Sign up now

Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

A rant about the semantics and meaning

A little different today, but bear with me as I climb on to my soapbox to rant about Digital Transformation. 😉

Upfront, I apologise, I’m sorry.

On to the update/rant.

The phrase Digital Transformation, and why it is misused

I understand the lure; honestly, I do. It’s a snappy phrase and something that evokes moving forward and resolving problems, but boy do I dislike the phrase Digital Transformation! Odd indeed for a consultant that has created a business solely to help companies with their Digital Transformations!

Why do I dislike the phrase then, when it’s contributing to feeding the family? Surely I should embrace the phrase, lean in and exploit its use the maximum amount of advantage to my business? That would be the most obvious thing to do os course. But I’ve never been simple, or standard. I’m an Englishman in the French West Indies for Christ’s sake!

I have no liking, nor affection for the phrase “Digital Transformation” because of what it has become and what it means to most people. I'm a little melodramatic of course, but let me explain, but first a short history for context.

When we first started this journey computerising and digitalising businesses, we had clear goals and clear objectives that were easily measured: "13% productivity increase in the process", "240% increase in efficiency". It was simple; solutions existed, or solutions were created quickly to respond to easily identifiable business problems.

Neumann’s calculating machine, albeit discussed in an academic paper, proved that simple calculations repeatedly exercised regularly in business, automated easily with significant gains in productivity. Something that took teams of “Meatware” hours or days to perform could be done in minutes and hours. The benefits were obvious. The imagined savings only served to facilitate the implementation of the computers that would eventually hit the market.

The introduction of more powerful computers and ultimately Smartphones had had profound effects on how businesses operate today, from the 1960s when IBM introduced the System 360 to today’s tablet/PC hybrid computers that are always-on, always mobile and always connected to the network, be it wifi, LTE or the coming 5G. Business processes are now performed, managed and analysed in near-realtime, anywhere on the planet and at any time. This shift in paradigm is hugely important to understand when you undertake your business operations transformations.

My discussion is leading to where there is much to do, Business Operations. Digital Transformation has been hijacked by marketing and opportunists to mean something that it is not, or more accurately, something smaller than it is in reality.

If we look at one of the better definitions (in my opinion), Digital Transformation is:

Digital Transformation is the methodology in which organizations transform and create new business models and culture with digital technologies.

First and foremost, a “methodology”, not a project, not a product and certainly not a service, you cannot buy twelve kilos of Digital Transformation from your local Digital Transformation Supermarket … for a good reason! Methodologies are developed, tested and refined on an ongoing basis, in situ within an organisation that is in the midst of transformation.

Secondly, organisational transformation — implying change — is hard, very hard. And transformation takes time and effort from all stakeholders, but when that change is Digital Transformation, it is exponentially more difficult. It requires a shift in mindset and is fraught with difficulties and traps all along the journey.

The third, and arguably one of the most critical elements in the definition, is the word new. New implies innovation, in the sense that we invent something new. Please don’t confuse it with revolution though. Innovation, as I’ve previously discussed, is a process where we look at existing ways of doing something and using tools and methodologies, and we construct a better way to — at the very least — achieve the same thing. Sometimes Innovation leads us to change the process, enabling hitherto unknown benefits. Structure, methodology and one other thing allow this.

That last thing is Culture. You have to change Culture to succeed in Digital Transformation, which is why, in 2013, McKinsey estimated that around 70% of all Digital Transformation projects were bound to fail and why Constellation Research’s annual Digital Transformation study for 2018 (published in January 2019) showed that 58% of internal staff were resistant to change, entailing an impediment to successful Digital Transformation. Respondents of the same survey returned that 67% of Leadership in any organisation was concerned and preoccupied with the change to organisational culture that would be required. But it’s not all bad news …

Of the projects for Digital Transformation that were completed successfully in 2018, 68% yielded a positive ROI, with only 9% responding that they didn’t. What do we conclude from this? Well, Digital Transformation is hard, something I’ve discussed at length, but the benefits are there, and they are achievable with the right help, methodologies and processes. Regardless of the reason for Digital Transformation, be it efficiency gains, building a competitive advantage in a market, innovating and creating a new market, the advantages to changing culture are repeatable and reusable benefits for all involved.

But I haven’t explained as yet why I dislike the phrase so much.

The phrase has been hijacked to mean digital marketing. Organisations around the globe are popping up offering “Digital Transformation” Services. When I look into this in detail, they are almost always digital marketing offices. Their services are valuable, and their services are necessary — in case you thought there were sour grapes —, but their services only respond to one small side of the requirements, and in some case resolve nothing.

Take, for example, an organisation that wants to develop a better, more flexible and efficient way of collecting data and displaying that information in a way that creates value for them and their clients. I’m currently working with one such company on a project whose goal is to do just that. We’ve been developing an interactive dashboard of decisional data that enables assessment of the efficiency of their third-party suppliers, their clients’ operations. Soon, we aim to be capable of predicting with reasonable accuracy the life span of the vital equipment in their clients’ sites. This is a business process, and no level of marketing input will change the fundamental operations digital transformation required. Ultimately, digital marketing will help us generalise, educate and sell our services to a broader market, but the fundamentals of the business must initially transform.

Another client of mine has an even more fundamental business process issue. They currently use much paper — stored for ten years — to plan, execute and record time spent on projects that are just screaming out for innovation using Digital Transformation. I’m setting up a small pilot project to assess whether my recommendations will bring the benefits estimated (I’m quietly confident incidentally).

There are hundreds of thousands of businesses out there in the Caribbean alone, that require, no need, help in transforming digitally.

Be a good citizen. Please forward this email on to them, talk to them and get them on board with a small (inexpensive) project for them to see the value of Digital Transformation immediately. Often, we can use mostly un-used but existing tools to achieve meaningful results.

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I said I didn’t like the phrase Digital Transformation, but secretly, I love it. Shhh, don’t tell anyone. Let me know how you get on.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interesting in learning about Digital Transformation and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

Sign up now

Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

Orange, Canal+ and Netflix going toe to toe

Sometimes these newsletters virtually write themselves. Other times it’s a struggle because the topic is so big or so complicated that I can only hope to scratch at the surface, doing a poor job at that.

I’ll let you guess which type this one is 😢

On to the update.

China, Venezuela and The Cloud

With the recent kerfuffle between China and the NBA, China and the Trump administration and then Apple (or more precisely the App Store and China), I thought it would be interesting to analyse a little of what is happening and how companies are starting to do rewind years of work entering China.

Firstly, some background. The Houston Rockets General Manager, Daryl Storey, tweeted and quickly deleted, in support of the protests that had been raging in the former British colony of Hong Kong since the proposal for extraditions from Hong Kong to mainland China was introduced.

The fact that the Rockets Chief’s tweet solicited such reaction is due in part to the drafting of Yao Ming in 2002. He’s become a legendary figure in the Houston Rockets and the NBA as a whole. Yao Ming is a Chinese national and has single-handedly popularised the sport in China to the degree that the country boasts more fans of the sport than the home nation, the U.S.A. The NBA additionally marketed itself to the market to take advantage of the opportunity.

The backlash in China meant that pre-season games went played un-televised, a first for China. It had an immediate effect on the advertising and rights revenues of the NBA. Estimates put it at around 500 million Chinese that have watched at least one NBA game last season, that’s many eyes to market products and services.

Cutting a long story short, it became clear that China’s power and influence were starting to have an effect on internal affairs and attitudes within the United States and elsewhere around the globe. Some even called for boycotts of Chinese products, with the affair enabling political heavyweights to dive into condemning the superpower. A Democratic candidate tweeted that the U.S. 

“must lead with our values and speak out for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and not allow American citizens to be bullied by an authoritarian government.” - Julián Castro:

Apple’s involvement was more pedestrian and garnered criticism only because Apple did something, pulled back, then did something again. All in a short space of time and with a particularly lousy explanation of their indecisiveness. The issue surrounded their denial-approval-denial of an app that was used to help people understand where protests were happening in Hong Kong (see above).

In another example of the difficulty of internationally offering services, Adobe — or more crucially the users of Adobe’s services — fell victim to the U.S. Government’s sanctions in Venezuela. Users suddenly found themselves without access to the Creative Cloud Suite (Photoshop, Lightroom, amongst others) from today. Adobe has offered refunds for services paid for but unconsumed only after an outcry from users that had the rug pulled from underneath them. However, in a blog post earlier this week, Adobe says they have reached an agreement with the U.S. Administration to keep serving its Venezuelan customers, effective immediately.

If you run a business like that the generates a meaningful part of your income, or you rely on services of this nature to get your professional work done, then this is not a comfort at all and has highlighted the risks of the cloud computing model. The wind (read: political) direction can suddenly change, leaving you without revenue or the tools of your trade. That is a business risk that is possibly too much to bear for some. It is the genesis of why some businesses are starting to devise ways of protecting their revenue and even providing better value-add. However, as for any business, adversity is often an opportunity well disguised.

Microsoft’s sovereignty and de-risking problem

If we look at Microsoft and their pivot from selling desktop and server software that was licensed on a perpetual basis — installed on computers and servers located in the companies who signed agreements with Microsoft — to what is basically renting software installed and maintained in Microsoft’s own Datacenters , we see that Microsoft's initial idea revolved around mutualising as much data as possible in one datacenter. The idea obviously, to lower COGS that directly affect profit margin.

Microsoft started with a couple of what it calls regions — datacenter located in a specific geographic location that serves one or more countries locally, think Europe, with Datacenters in London and Dublin serving France, Belgium, Germany, and others —, and has expanded rapidly over the years from market pressure and sovereignty issues. In Europe, Germany was one of the first countries to mandate that data relating to its citizens reside within the confines of the country. Something that forced Microsoft to build out a new region in Germany, for Germans. At great expense, I might add. Other countries followed suit, France, Switzerland and of course, China.

Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regions/

Not only did this have the effect of complying with the sovereignty requests of some European and Eastern regulations, but it has the added benefit of reducing outage risks when a Datacenter failure only affects the particular region. In the case of Germany, a failure in its region only affects German customers and those who rely on the German Datacenter. Albeit at enormous cost, but a cost that can only be described as the cost of doing business in that region. It also had a side benefit of allowing Microsoft to compete in highly sensitive Government projects tag would otherwise be out of reach for the American multi-national. Look at the recently awarded contract of 10 billion dollars for the Pentagon.

What we also know is that the potential for cloud computing is only just beginning. Potential in terms of what can be done, but the potential in pure market opportunity numbers. The low hanging fruit of the simple workloads has all but migrated to the cloud already — email, basic operations tasks, data warehousing, basic office computing and others. The next big opportunity is moving the integrated and intricate workloads of large and complex ERP systems and creating value by linking them to those already-migrated primary workloads. Microsoft was first in developing the hybrid model when AWS and others were “all-in” on the cloud paving nothing for existing local workloads. Microsoft’s efforts were basic and often complex, but offered the opportunity to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Now Amazon and Google have understood this and are structuring their businesses to compete in this area.

The foreseeable future looks bright for the cloud business.

CANAL+ and Netflix’s (new) Maitresse

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Netflix had inked a deal to provide its content through (a paid-for extra) Canal+, Orange — the European telecoms giant — announced and advertised that it too could provide Netflix to its customers. The deal was initially signed in 2014, yes five years ago, and was resigned in 2017 to reinforce the offer of programming "originally" created by Netflix and distributed to its worldwide customer base, with particular focus on Europe and Africa.

However, this has just changed, and it seems, in direct response to the Canal+ offering. Previously Orange downplayed the fact they were distributing Netflix Originals, only publicising the program and film titles, now the full Netflix subscription is available directly on the set-top box. Nothing new and extraordinary for Netflix, as they have been bundling their player software on televisions and set-top boxes for many years. What is interesting is that Orange had to react immediately to the Netflix threat (not from Netflix but Canal+) and did so quickly and simply by activating a Netflix player app on their set-top box, which incidentally accepts existing Netflix accounts and subscriptions. Now they too, "have Netflix".

The takeaway from this is that Canal+ thought it was in a stronger position than Netflix when Netflix entered the market through Orange. It was up until that point practically the only distributor of original content (aside from terrestrial television)1, something that differentiated it from Orange and others in the market. It was, however, a miscalculation because people don’t want to see a program or a film because it is from one distributor or another, they want to see great content regardless of where it originates. That is what Netflix already understood, and is reason why Netflix continues to invest in “Original" programming to the tune of a few billion dollars a year. Netflix was always going to have leverage because it is an aggregate and has zero marginal costs relative to Canal+. Boutiques, boxes and after-sales service cost much money; and despite Netflix having increasing COGS, but they are nowhere near what Canal+ would require for the same investments in original content. Canal+ was doomed to open the door to Netflix. It was just a matter of time.

Oh, how disruption makes even the mightiest dance around to the tune of the disrupter, or should I say, Aggregator?

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interesting in learning about Digital Transformation and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

Sign up now

Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

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WeWork’s gaff and the opportunity for LinkedIn

Just released: I was a honoured to be a guest on Kadia Francis’ podcast, The Digital Jamaica Podcast. You can get more details on Kadia’s blog here.

Digitalising meetings and conferences is something that is becoming evermore useful for businesses and individuals alike, I explore a couple of examples here.

On to the update.

Virtual Island Summit

As previously mentioned that I had attended a few sessions of the Virtual Island Summit, and as a general comment, the content was very thought-provoking and very much geared to the context here in the Caribbean. However, despite being relevant to the Caribbean, much of the content drew on ideas and experiences from around the world.

One of the first presentations was entitled Digital Social Innovation To Empower Democracy. The title intrigued me, so I put aside some time to follow the session with a little more attention than I would normally. Several things struck me as attractive from a perspective of Digital Transformation and how they weave with local contexts.

The talk presented by Audrey Tang, who is the Digital Innovation Minister from Taiwan. Which immediately got me thinking about our Islands and territories, and which have specific jobs, ministries and elected officials in that capacity.

Spending, admittedly, a short period researching, there appear to be few positions in local Government dedicated to digital, let alone devoted to topics concerning digital that directly affect the population. Most Ministers and authorities are trying to wrangle digital change in their countries and are leveraging either traditional utilities or education-focused bodies. Some have taken to promoting ICT departments, as they are "digital".

I believe this to be wrong for the reasons I've been discussing in this newsletter for months now. The element that is most important in Digital Transformation is not the "Digital"! This fact couldn't be stated clearly enough in the presentation from Audrey Tang.

Let's go back to the title, Digital Social Innovation To Empower Democracy, and break that down a little.

Democracy is not just your right to vote, or criticise your Government (quite a relevant topic currently based on what is happening in Hong Kong at the moment - avoiding that one for now though!), but it is a means by which all citizens can participate in some way towards the collective benefit of all citizens within their town, region or country.

Some things are small, others are large and have a more significant impact, but they are all crucial for democracy, in that they form part of the whole that shapes Society into what it is. I'm not going to lecture you on whether or not you should vote, but what I would say is that you should at least take some responsibility for the outcomes of your own country based on your participation.

As for Innovation, I've discussed Innovation previously in the context of Digital Transformation:

When we talk of innovation, we tend to think of the finished product, like when the initial iPhone was unveiled. It was a stunning “innovation” and completely trumped what the market at that time had to offer… in some ways. Interestingly, it is best explained by Disruption Theory, by entering a market with less features but doing the JTBD brilliantly, so brilliantly in fact, that it quickly ate up market share to the dismay of all the incumbents in the market at the time.

But innovation isn’t the product, innovation is the process. And, innovation doesn’t have to produce a physical product at the end of the process, it can simply be a better way an organisation works internally, for example something as simple as better stock management in the warehouse. To cut it down to its basics, innovation is any change in a business process, or product/service that adds value. Innovation is similarly, not limited to the development of something new and exciting, it can be an incremental change that produces better outcomes for the organisation. Lastly, innovation is a continuous process. Once you have innovated, the work doesn’t stop there. Remember, the new new becomes the new old very quickly in these times!

Lastly, I think the essential element in the title is Social. Although it goes hand in hand with democracy in this context it was necessary, in my view, to single out this aspect in the sense that what the title actually says is that Taiwan was using digital transformation tools and technologies to help society as a whole, through participative projects, contribute to the development and betterment of the country. And when you listened to some of the projects presented, it is precisely what happened.

Take some time to watch some of the debates and presentations on the YouTube channel; I think you'll find them valuable to your own Digital Transformation. I'll be writing up the others over the coming weeks too.

WeWork’s gaff and the opportunity for LinkedIn

LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, has announced that its platform is to receive several new features this year, most notably features designed to help recruiting and job seeking. But one features caught my eye as it is a Job To Be Done already filled by several platforms and social networks, that of event planning and organising.

LinkedIn Events, the new tools from LinkedIn, allows users to create and participate in professional events around the globe when it is fully rolled out. Currently, it is on trial in NYC and San Francisco but should be rolling out to more cities around the world in the future, with English speaking countries first. Slated to work similarly to Facebook events, LinkedIn Events is more focused on professionals and associations, focused on helping them organise and plan an event for both local and remote participants using the segmentation tools of the platform, Industry, Company for example.

It comes at a very opportune time, as the giant of the meet up social networks, Meetup, made a strategic error that may cost them their business entirely.

From Forbes:

WeWork-owned Meetup, an app that allows anyone to create and attend events, may start charging some attendees $2 per event, a change that’s already drawing criticism from event organizers who say the pricing model will force them to ditch the app and shut down their groups.

• The policy, introduced as a test for some groups in late September, requires anyone attending a Meetup event to pay $2 when they RSVP. Organizers have the option of covering the cost of each attendee themselves if they don’t want to charge participants.

• Event organizers already pay a membership fee to list their events on Meetup. The policy would also lower that fee to $24 per year from up to $200 per year.

• Meetup is positioning the change as a reduction in costs for organizers, but some say if they choose to cover the $2 themselves, they’ll end up paying more than $240 per year, making the app unaffordable.

• Some groups have upwards of 200 members, and organizers say they don’t want to exclude people who might not be able to afford a fee, especially if that group meets multiple times per week. 

• Meetup users slammed the changes as an effort to squeeze more cash from the app as its owner WeWork faces financial challenges following the cancellation of its IPO. WeWork may also be looking to sell off Meetup altogether.

WeWork subsequently did an about-face, "clarifying" that this was simply a limited-reach test and that no final plans to change the current pricing structure. But this announcement highlights the dangers of digital platforms where, once they become all-powerful from the network effects, they can attempt to dictate the rules of the game. Users were quick to remonstrate, and it was this dissent that promoted a statement from Meetup CEO David Siegel to that effect.

But the damage has been done. And many of Meetup's members are already looking toward other platforms, which is where LinkedIn slots in nicely and in some respects, LinkedIn is a better platform for this type of offer. Not only does the platform have rich information on the professional lives of people, but the value of being seen to participate in the community, regardless what that community is, is increasing as a differentiator to potential employers and a value proposition for prospective employees to display.

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