In our last 2024 issue, I asked you to vote what you wanted to read about this year, and “digital transformation” came on top (quite comfortably above the second favorite, customer experience).
Strangely enough, this response made me take a step back and ponder upon the concept of “digital transformation”. Is there a unique way to tackle this big, broad, vague subject? Do we have a shared understanding of what it means, involves or requires?
The answer is simply “no”, because we all tend to categorize distinct concerns about our company’s immediate future into this idea of transformation. Turning an undefined, subjective matter into something useful we can all apply to our business requires some reframing.
Pioneering is expensive
David Bowie was arguably the most influential musician of the 20th century. A quick glimpse into his career will undoubtedly show his uncanny ability to transform, adapt, explore and trailblaze.
There’s one particular chapter in his career that’s less known by people outside of his fan circle. He conceived, financed and led an Internet Service Provider called, of course, BowieNet. Back in 1998, the Thin White Duke released a paid service for dial-up internet. You know, the kind that you paid monthly to connect your old screeching modem to the vast, unexplored, rebellious and free World Wide Web. For $19.90 a month you got a service similar to what AOL could get, plus:
- An avatar-based virtual world where you could interact with other fans in imaginary, Bowie-esque, aesthetic and quirky polygon-textured 3D scenarios.
- Access to exclusive songs, releases and even live streamed events. “Streamed” might be an overstatement, since the 56kb modem speed was about 5,000 times slower than your standard 2025 broadband connection.
- Invitation to fan forums where the chameleonic Ziggy Stardust himself used to participate under multiple, often purposely leaked nicknames.
- And of course an @bowienet email so you could show your badge to the world.
Compare it to today’s available tech.
It was a predecessor for SecondLife, WoW or, of course, the extravagant and useless Metaverse. BowieNet laid foundations for art, media and entertainment services like Spotify or Netflix. It gave fans unique virtual identities (skins) and nexus that inspired future pop and gaming culture from The Sims to Fortnite. It also pre-dated 1:1 artist and fanbase conversations that we might see on today’s social networks from Instagram to Onlyfans. And it established superb, highly codified branding that went way beyond artistic output.
BowieNet was a groundbreaking endeavor that innovated at many levels. It never scaled beyond a niche experiment and wasn’t commercially successful. Innovation doesn’t always pay off.
Being ahead of your time can suck just as much as lagging behind.
Building the In-betweens
In a wonderful 1999 interview with BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, the man who fell to earth shared his vision of what the future would bring in the interplay of technology and art:
An art piece is not finished until the audience comes to it and adds their own interpretation. What the piece is about is the gray space in the middle, that gray space is what the next century is about.
Digital transformation is nothing, and it’s everything. It’s building that gray space in the middle. It’s adopting technology so it operates upon reality, creating the right gaps for our customers to fill and letting them define what our brand actually is.
Ground control
Let’s bring this down to earth. Digital transformation is NOT about:
- Chasing trends, but creating adaptable systems. Walking before we can run. Building foundations. The most important thing our agency does is not designing or developing ecommerce websites, but showing our customers where the gaps are so they can have a solid foundation that can iterate and evolve in time.
- Completing a checklist of tools. Planning how to catch-up with technology usually becomes a journey where procurement teams and company leaders go through endless 3-hour demos with dozens of platforms. Instead, take the time to really understand what you want to achieve, instead of locking yourself into what a certain expensive piece of software can allow you to do.
- Faking efficiency. A new PIM won’t fix your broken process just like going to the gym doesn’t mean you’ll exercise. A poorly constructed data model will render your CRM useless, no matter how expensive or fancy it is. Improving operations is never as easy as turning a new system on. AI can’t “revolutionize” your team’s output if you don’t take enough time to really understand what can be optimized, automated, or delegated to an agent.
Instead, it’s about an operational mindset.
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us
Marshall McLuhan (via John Culkin)
We’re the past
I’d like to delve deeper into an idea I believe should impact the way we manage technology and branding. We move backwards into the future. As new tech is created, it starts to effect change, operating into reality, and more importantly, into identity. It alters the way we understand ourselves, how we relate to each other. Our consumption habits. Our idea of what work is. The values, benefits, rationals and irrationals behind our choices.
We can never really see those changes happening. We merely measure the results as a given fact. Think of how different the world feels now, compared to ten years ago. How many bold expert predictions did you come across that were utterly wrong?
What we perceive as “the future” is, in fact, the latest snapshot of our most recent past. We live reality through a rear-view mirror. The most we can do to benefit our organizations, strategy and operations is to understand our context, mediums, messages and the interplay of those spaces. Allow me to expand on that in the next chapter, two weeks from now.
It’s never over
The term “digital transformation” implies that we can decide to change through tech. It’s actually the opposite. As tech evolves, we’re constantly changing, and so are our customers, our culture, practices, processes and potential. It is you who is being “digitally transformed” all the time.
It’s no longer a game of catch-up. It’s a practice. And like any work of art, it’s never complete.
We should obsess less about the tools, and more about what we want to achieve, when, and what we’re willing to do to get there. We’re always starting and restarting. Keep calm and embrace the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
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Rule of thumb
Efficiency and Optimization, two beloved words for managers everywhere, are a byproduct of strategy, vision and execution. They are tools, not goals. Understand the space connecting you and your audience before figuring out which technology will create the best bridge.
Just a few pointers. For help making plans and setting priorities, check out our Blueprint service.
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Find me here if you want to have a chat.
Santiago.-
