How To Fend Off Digital Disruption

Anticipating future opportunities based on hard and soft trends is a crucial weapon in helping CIOs stave off being a victim of digital transformation. Clint Boulton explores what is needed to commit to an ‘anticipatory IT’ strategy.

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Most enterprises, afraid of losing ground to competitors in the digital era, are moving at such a rapid pace that they often miss warning signs that portend disruption before it’s too late. But companies can prepare themselves and help fend off this innovator’s dilemma by capitalising on emerging trends and anticipating where their respective industries are heading.

That is what futurist and author Daniel Burrus proposes in his new book, The Anticipatory Organisation: turn disruption and change into opportunity and advantage, which is due for release on 10th Octber. His theory? Change is linear, exponential and predictable: Burrus found that 93 percent of 1,000 companies he surveyed said their biggest problem had been predictable — they just weren’t looking in the right areas.

Burrus emphasises that one of the main reasons companies are disrupted is that they are so busy looking in the rearview mirror that they miss opportunities looming in their front windshield. If brick and-mortar retailers had paid attention to e-commerce trends and a startup called Amazon.com, they wouldn’t be closing hundreds of stores a year. If Blockbuster and others had moved quicker to streaming video perhaps Netflix wouldn’t have starved them out of business. If BlackBerry, then Research in Motion, had moved more quickly to address the iPhone, perhaps it wouldn’t have been left scrambling for purchase.

Disruption is there - if you look

“Every disruption that has ever happened was there to see,” Burrus says. “Why didn’t a cab driver think of Uber? Why didn’t the big hotel chains think of Airbnb? They’re all really busy. You can busy yourself right out of business.”