In the 67th episode of Burning Platform, we host Dion Hinchcliffe, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT.
We talk about the progress around digital transformation projects and how the pandemic has affected them. Dion responds “the pandemic showed us we could transform quicker than we thought we could. IF we had the will to do it.”
Dion starts off distinguishing between “digitization" and “automation” as efficiency plays versus digital transformations which have at least some element of disruption, and think about the “art of the possible.”
We cover examples from retail, healthcare, food service, real estate and several other industries. He talks about tools which are definitely helping customers – digital transformation target platforms, process mining, low code and AI driven code generation. He cites use of incubators, industry consortia and centers of excellence around emerging technologies.
We discuss service providers – firms like Accenture and Deloitte, growing role of strategy firms like McKinsey and of hyperscalers like Google on such transformation journeys.
Are we hitting a point of exhaustion with such programs? We better not – he says only 15% of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud. In some ways we are still in the “crude, cave painting” phase of the journey. He is worried about mid market companies and companies with plenty of technical debt and those who have under invested in technology. We also cover the risk that companies will take short cuts like they did during the re-engineering wave in the 1990s. We reinforce it is a marathon, not a sprint.
We also discuss his personal digital lifestyle. This blog post about his "every day carry bag" shows you he practices what he preaches.
It is a fascinating half an hour of wisdom from Dion.
