The new CIO: visionary of the postdigital age

Deloitte has identified “five postdigital forces” disrupting business: cloud, mobile, social, analytics and cyber and says that CIOs must become visionaries guiding enterprises into the postdigital age, but it’s a rather odd umbrella term for forces that are themselves manifestations of the power of digital technology.

At first glance Deloitte’s 2013 Tech Trends report released last week might seem like a repeat of its Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2013 released a couple of weeks earlier.

The TMT report focused on those developments expected over the next 12-18 months that are in turn expected to have major long-term developments on the industry. The Tech Trends report highlights the top 10 enabling and disrupting technology trends that Deloitte anticipates will have a significant impact for the CIO in the future.

I discussed the TMT report in this column a couple of weeks ago and on re-reading it and comparing it with the Tech Trends report it’s clear that whereas the TMT report focussed on a dozen or so disparate technology developments the Tech Trends report is much more coherent document that examines a number of major inter-related and disruptive forces that are likely to fundamentally reshape all aspects of the information technology industry. Also, it very much addresses the CIO.

In addition, the TMT report was mostly about prediction whereas the Tech Trends report is weighted heavily towards recommendations, directed particularly at the CIO. It also introduces a new term: ‘postdigital’.

In Deloitte’s view the CIO will be the messiah of the postdigital age and, somewhat paradoxically will morph into the chief digital officer “leading digital sources of revenue as well as digital marketplace products and services.”

Australian CIOs are singled out in the report with a call to action: “The traditional Australian IT department is under siege from technology spend moving beyond their sphere of direct control, but the collision of the five postdigital forces creates an opportunity for the CIO to shape business performance and future competitive stance by being the postdigital visionary and acting as a guide through the digital disruption maze.”

Certainly enterprises need to be guided, or more likely led, through the digital disruption maze, but I do wonder how helpful it is to label such guides and leaders ‘postdigital visionaries’.

Postdigital is Deloitte's “perspective on how organisations can provoke and harvest the disruption wrought by digital technology.” It’s even claiming ownership of the concept: it has trademarked the term ‘postdigital enterprise’ where “all five forces [listed above] are mature, implemented, integrated, and baked-in instead of bolted-on.”

However the term seems to at odds with its meaning: rather than foreshadowing an age beyond digital technology, as it suggests, it seems to be envisaging a hyperdigital or uberdigital world where the technology is even more pervasive and fundamental to the workings of business and industry than it is today.

Deloitte justifies this apparent contradiction as follows: “The postdigital era, like the post-industrial era, reflects a ‘new normal’ for business and a new basis for competition. In post-industrial times, we didn’t forego industrialisation, we embraced it. The postdigital era is similar, but with digitalisation as its core.”

Deloitte’s definition of the term appears to be entirely its own and is at odds with a more generally accepted definition as set out in Wikipedia. There ‘postdigital’ represents what its construction suggests it should represent: something beyond digital, and like postmodern, it’s a description of movement in art, rather than technology.

It “points significantly to our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. It points to an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital.”

It has long been the habit of historians to delineate the history of civilisation into ages on the basis of the dominant technology of the day, from the stone age through to the industrial age and beyond to the information age. However neatly trying to sum up the future in similar fashion has its drawbacks: it can channel thinking and vision along the lines laid out.

And there is no shortage of alternatives vision for a future beyond the industrial or the information age. Don Tapscott, billed as one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic and social impact of technology, told an APEC CEO Summit of world leaders in Hawaii in 2011: “Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.”

Earlier this year, an article in the Ericsson Business Review headed: “Goodbye to the industrial age”, argued that the age of hyper-connectivity would see a massive shift from the production of goods for sale to the provision of services of which those goods are but one component. “Why sell the product if you can sell the function instead?” it argues. “Today, there is a strong push toward so-called industrial product-service systems, total-care products, functional sales or functional products.”

The predictions, recommendations and individual viewpoints set out in the 2013 Tech Trends reports make for interesting and worthwhile reading. I’m not sure they need unifying under an abstraction such as ‘the postdigital enterprise’.