Chapter 1
Why Transform Your Business Digitally?
The primary goal of Cisco Digital Network Architecture (Cisco DNA) is to accelerate the digital transformation of customers’ businesses. Therefore, before diving into the technologies within this architecture, it’s important to understand the business opportunities and challenges that customers are facing, thus setting relevant context for how Cisco DNA addresses these.
This chapter introduces and discusses the following:
The opportunities and threats presented by digital transformation
How digital technologies have transformed entire industries
Case-study examples of how digital technologies are transforming key areas of business, including:
Customer experiences
Employee experiences
Operations
Digital transformation and the Internet of Things (IoT)
Opportunities and Threats
Transform or die. It’s really that simple when it comes to digital business. Provide your customers new experiences, delivering them greater value, personalization, convenience and satisfaction—or your competition will. Enable your employees new workplace experiences, empowering them to collaborate effectively, and effortlessly, improving their overall productivity and job satisfaction—or your opposition will. Leverage technology to reduce costs, make informed data-driven decisions, and reallocate resources from operation to innovation—or your rivals will.
Does that sound a bit dramatic? Not according to a 2015 study1 of 941 companies around the world in 12 different industries done by the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, which highlighted that roughly 40 percent of today’s top ten incumbents (in terms of market share) in each industry will be displaced by digital disruption within the next five years. Furthermore, the same study showed that 43 percent of companies either do not acknowledge the risk of digital disruption or have not addressed it sufficiently, with nearly a third adopting a “wait and see” attitude. The industries most under threat of digital disruption are shown in Figure 1-1.
1 J. Bradley, J. Loucks, J. Macaulay, A. Noronha, and M. Wade, “Digital Vortex: How Digital Disruption Is Redefining Industries,” Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, June 2015, https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/industry-solutions/digital-vortex-report.pdf.
In contrast, companies that have mastered digital technology transformations have outperformed their industry peers by 9 percent in revenue generation and 26 percent in profitability, according to the Harvard Business Review Press book Leading Digital.
How real is digital transformation? To answer this, let’s consider some examples of entire industries that were either significantly disrupted or completely transformed by various forms of digitalization.
Digitally Transforming Industries
Industries such as advertising, media and entertainment, finance, communications, transportation, and others have been radically transformed by the advent of digital technologies and processes. Incumbents that adopted “wait and see” attitudes were quickly displaced, while bold innovators grabbed market share at astonishing rates, as the following few examples demonstrate.
Digital Advertising
In 1995, Craig Newmark posed an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. This list became a web-based service, called Craigslist, the following year and has since expanded to over 570 cities in 70 countries worldwide. As Craigslist steadily gained popularity, eventually becoming a top-100 website, it virtually single-handedly put the newspaper classified-advertising industry out of business in every city it entered, while earning itself nearly $700 million in annual revenues—all with only 50 employees!
Similarly, digital advertising for local businesses by applications like Angie’s List, Yelp, and others have displaced paper-based “Yellow Pages” telephone directories, which held the monopoly for local business advertising for over 40 years.
Companies that have been slow to adapt to the shift from print advertising to digital have suffered similar fates. In sharp contrast, companies like Google, Facebook, and Baidu have embraced digital advertising and transformed themselves into industry leaders in this $187B2 market, earning themselves $19B, $18B, and $10B (respectively) in 2016, and collectively garnishing 25 percent of the global market.
2 Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Revenue Soars on Ad Growth,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-revenue-soars-on-ad-growth-1461787856.
Digital Media and Entertainment
Apple complemented the release of the iPod in 2001 with its digital music iTunes Store in 2003. Within five years iTunes became the world’s largest music vendor, earning over $6B per year in revenue. Concurrently, music retail stores like Virgin Megastores, HMV, Tower Records, and others closed up shop en masse.
In the video entertainment industry, scarcely a decade ago Blockbuster ruled as king, boasting 60,000 employees in over 9000 stores and nearly $6B in annual revenue. In one of the greatest instances of modern business irony, Blockbuster turned down an offer to purchase newcomer Netflix for $50M in 2000. Undaunted, Netflix transformed the video entertainment industry several times over: The first transformation digitalized the movie-selection process, enabling users to browse for movies online, rather than at a store (and the movies selected would be mailed to them on DVDs). The second, and more impactful transformation, was Netflix’s digitalizing the delivery process as well, enabling movies to be streamed to customers directly, anytime, anywhere, and on virtually any device. Yet another transformation saw Netflix become an original content producer, as well as distributor. The result of these digital transformations has made Netflix the world’s leading Internet television network with over 125 million members in over 190 countries, earning over $11B in annual revenue. In 2018, Netflix, which was esteemed by Blockbuster as not being worth $50M, reached a market capitalization in excess of $144B.
Digital Finance
To facilitate the exploding demand of online purchases and transactions, PayPal digitalized the payment process. Sending checks and money orders through the mail seems like an artifact of the distant past now, in contrast to the flexibility, convenience, and speed of funds transferred via PayPal. Such customer benefits translate to significant bottom-line results for PayPal, who in 2017 processed over 5 billion transactions for 237 million users and earned $13B in revenue.
Digital Communications
With the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies in the early 2000s, incumbent telecommunications providers were put under pressure to compete—which for many proved to be a new experience, having had the luxury of being geographic monopolies for decades. In the process they lost hundreds of billions of dollars. And the hemorrhaging continues. For example, a recent study estimates that the telecommunications industry will lose a further $386B between 2012 and 2018 to over-the-top (OTT) VoIP applications.3
3 Erik Heinrich, “Telecom Companies Count $386 Billion in Lost Revenue to Skype, WhatsApp, Others,” Fortune, June 23, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/06/23/telecom-companies-count-386-billion-in-lost-revenue-to-skype-whatsapp-others/.
In fact, a single application, WhatsApp, is threatening the short message service (SMS) market as a whole, as shown in Figure 1-2. WhatsApp provides users more flexibility and cost savings as compared to SMS, allowing users to send not only text messages, but also photos, videos, documents, and other media. And when users are connected to Wi-Fi networks, they can send and receive their messages and media for free, avoiding SMS data charges. The value of WhatsApp is recognized by many, including Facebook, which acquired it in 2014 for $19.3B. In 2016, WhatsApp surpassed 1 billion users.
4 Satoshi Kambayashi, “The Message Is the Medium,” The Economist, March 26, 2015, https://www.economist.com/business/2015/03/26/the-message-is-the-medium.
Additionally, as the mobile messaging industry is becoming increasingly commoditized, regulatory changes (such as prohibiting roaming charges in certain markets) are putting even more pressure on classical business models utilized by telecom incumbents, further exacerbating their disadvantage to digital transformers, like WhatsApp.
Digital Transportation Services
In San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and over 600 additional cities worldwide, hailing a cab is becoming a quaint memory, thanks to Uber, launched in 2011. In just a few short years, Uber completely transformed the taxi industry by leveraging digital technology. The Uber app, shown in Figure 1-3, allows customers with smartphones to submit a trip request, which is automatically sent to the nearest Uber driver, alerting the driver to the location of the customer, and vice versa. Customers know exactly how long they have to wait and can watch on a map as their driver is approaching their location. Drivers know exactly where their customers are and where they wish to go, and can receive Global Positioning System (GPS) directions to their destination. Transactions are cashless and paperless, with receipts being emailed to the customers (facilitating easier expense reporting for business travelers). Additionally, the Uber app also serves to prevent language barriers, as can often be the case when communicating with taxi drivers in foreign cities. Uber also benefits drivers, who for the most part are freelance and use their personal vehicles, saving them significant franchising fees and operating overhead commonly incurred by taxi operators. In 2017, Uber—still a private company—was valuated at nearly $70B.
Zipcar has had a similar impact on the traditional rental-car industry. Founded in 2000 in Boston, the car-sharing service operates 10,000 vehicles in over 500 cities in 9 countries serving over a million users. As such, Zipcar is one of the world’s leading car rental networks in its own right. Members can reserve cars with Zipcar’s mobile app, online, or by phone at any time—immediately or up to a year in advance. Members have automated access to Zipcars using an access card which works with the car’s technology to unlock the door, where the keys are already located inside. The Zipcar mobile app also enables members to remotely honk the horn to locate their reserved Zipcar and unlock the doors (see Figure 1-4). As such, many urban residents find Zipcar to be a convenient and cost-effective alternative to buying, maintaining, and parking their own cars.
Note
Avis acquired Zipcar in 2013 for $500M, providing a counter-example to Blockbuster, mentioned earlier. Specifically, Avis demonstrated foresight in adapting to digital transformation via a strategic acquisition.
Similarly, thanks to advances in digital technologies, bicycle-sharing services have exploded globally since the mid-2000s. As of June 2014, public bicycle-sharing systems were available in 712 cities, spanning 50 countries on five continents, operating approximately 806,200 bicycles at 37,500 stations. While implementations differ, bicycle-sharing companies often include wireless bike station terminals running on solar energy, radio-frequency identification (RFID) bike dock technology, and smartphone apps that locate and show the status of bike stations close to the users (see Figure 1-5). Bicycle-sharing systems aptly demonstrate the significant positive impact that digital technology can have on the environment as well as on the overall health of urban populations, by facilitating a greener and healthier transportation alternative.
Digitally Transforming Businesses
While not every digitally transformed organization ends up reshaping its entire industry, such companies are—on average—26 percent more profitable than their industry peers, as has already been noted. This fact alone has encouraged many organizations to examine areas where they can digitally transform. Some of these key areas include
Customer experience
Employee experience
Business operations
The following sections provide an overview of each of these areas, along with examples of industry leaders in each area.
Transforming the Customer Experience
Customer experience matters more than ever. And bad customer experiences can be fatal to a business.
For example, in 2011 Harris Interactive published a Customer Experience Impact Report that found that:
86 percent of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.
89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience (up from 68 percent in 2009).
79 percent of consumers who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored.
50 percent of consumers give a brand only one week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them.
Additionally, Forrester Research showed that a quarter of American consumers who had unsatisfactory service interactions in 2010 shared their experiences though social networks, which represented a 50 percent increase from the year before.5
5 www.forrester.com/North+American+Technologies+Customer+Experience+Online+Survey+Q4+2010+US/-/E-SUS805
Furthermore, an increasing number of customers are making purchasing decisions based on what their peers have to say, paying close attention to ratings, reviews, and testimonials on social-media and third-party sites and apps. As such, businesses have incentive like never before to leverage digital technology to provide superior customer service, as some of the following companies have demonstrated.
Burberry
In 2006 Burberry was lagging far behind its competitors. The high-fashion industry was growing at 12 to 13 percent per year, but Burberry was managing only 1 to 2 percent growth. Burberry’s new CEO at the time, Angela Ahrendts, decided to rebrand the company and focus on a new market: millennials. As such, Burberry undertook an aggressive digital strategy to reach this new customer base. It revamped its website and included an “Art of the Trench” social-media element where anyone could post pictures of themselves in their classic Burberry coat. Burberry partnered with Twitter to broadcast live fashion shows, and likewise partnered with Google to develop advanced “lip detection technology” so that customers could send digital kisses to loved ones anywhere in the world.
Burberry also complemented its online digital presence with extensive digital technologies in its retail stores, such as giant external and internal video displays in all its stores and by arming all its sales associates with iPads. Burberry’s fusion of digital and retail fashion is illustrated in Figure 1-6. Burberry even creatively combined RFID technology with its video displays, such that, for example, when a customer took a garment into a changing room to try it on, the RFID sensor recognized which garment(s) the customer was trying on and automatically signaled the video display in the changing room to begin playing a video of a fashion model wearing the same garment. This particular combination of digital technologies led to a significant increase in conversion rates to purchases. The net result of all these new digital customer experiences was the tripling of Burberry sales, as well as its share price, during Ahrendts’ tenure.6
6 Yousef Khan, “How Burberry Embraced Digital and Transformed into a Leading Luxury Brand,” Centric Digital, November 9, 2015, https://centricdigital.com/blog/digital-strategy/digital-transformation-in-traditional-fashion-burberry/.
Starbucks
Starbucks has been well described as “a digital innovation machine.”7 It was one of the first coffee chains to recognize the value of offering its customers free Wi-Fi, along with content (delivered by partnering with the New York Times, The Economist, Spotify, and others), which dramatically increased the length of time its customers linger and relax at its stores, as well as the corresponding number of beverages they order. Starbucks launched its MyStarbucks app in 2009, as shown in Figure 1-7. This morphed into a multipurpose vehicle which includes the following:
7 Larry Dignan, “Starbucks’ Digital Transformation: The Takeaways Every Enterprise Needs to Know,” ZDNET, November 1, 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/starbucks-digital-transformation-the-takeaways-every-enterprise-needs-to-know/.
Personalized advertising and promotions.
A digital replacement for a Starbucks card (and later fully integrated with both Apple Passbook and Apple Pay).
A Starbucks Store locator.
A reward-management system. The MyStarbucks Rewards program boasts over 20 million members and accounts for over 20 percent of transactions.
A Mobile Order and Pay service that allows busy customers to “skip the line” by placing their order and paying for it while on their way to a Starbucks and then having their beverage and food ready and waiting for them to pick up and go. The Mobile Order and Pay customer experience resulted in a 17 percent increase in revenues in the first year after its release.
UPS
United Parcel Service (UPS) is the world’s largest package delivery company, delivering more than 19 million packages per day to over 8 million customers in more than 220 countries and territories around the world. However, customers were often frustrated to receive notices or emails to the effect that their packages would be delivered on a certain day between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., as remaining at home for such a long window considerably inconvenienced most people.
In response to customer complaints, UPS began tracking each vehicle via GPS, not only to improve route optimizations (resulting in over 8 million gallons of fuel savings per year), but also to more accurately predict delivery windows, dramatically cutting these down to one- to two-hour slots. UPS also began enabling customers to monitor these reduced delivery windows via its mobile app. Customers now can elect to receive alerts when their delivery is imminent and can even provide the driver instructions directly from the app. These improvements in customers service via digital technologies have resulted in a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty for UPS.
Transforming the Employee Experience
It’s not only improved customer experiences that have a bottom-line impact on a business, but also improving the experience of their employees. Some of the challenges facing today’s workforce include the following:
Information overload: Information is still growing at exponential rates and employees can’t find what they need, even with technology advances.
The need for speed: With the rapid pace of today’s work environment, employees increasingly need to work faster and collaborate more effectively to get their jobs done.
An aging workforce: As baby boomers continue to retire, they are taking key knowledge with them, increasing the need to digitally capture their knowledge.
However, meeting these challenges with digital technologies can significantly improve the employee experience, as reported in a study by Deloitte8 that showed increases in the following areas:
8 Deloitte, “The Digital Workplace: Think, Share, Do,” https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/mx/Documents/human-capital/The_digital_workplace.pdf.
Employee productivity: Organizations with strong online social networks are 7 percent more productive than those without.
Employee Satisfaction: Organizations that installed social media tools internally found a median 20 percent increase in employee satisfaction.
Talent Attraction: 64 percent of employees would opt for a lower-paying job if they could work away from the office.
Employee Retention: When employee engagement increases, there is a corresponding increase in employee retention by up to 87 percent.
Some specific examples of companies that have harnessed digital technologies to improve employee experiences are overviewed next.
Air France
Prior to 2006, each Air France pilot, aircraft, and flight route required a unique set of on-board documentation that collectively added 60 pounds of paper to each flight. Furthermore, critical decisions relating to safety and operations were delayed in the paper-based communications process, including the delays required to type and photocopy all the relevant information, as well as the delays in mailing these instructions and updates to each of the over 4000 pilots and 15,000 flight attendants within the organization. The collective daily operational information filled entire dedicated rooms at multiple airports that Air France serviced. To cope, Air France made the key decision to digitize all such communications. By 2013, all of the necessary information was delivered to pilots via an iPad app, dubbed Pilot Pad, as shown in Figure 1-8. Now, not only do pilots have far less to carry (as do the aircrafts, resulting in considerable fuel savings), but also whenever Air France updates a document in its library, 60 percent of affected pilots review the updates within 24 hours, thus increasing the safety and efficiency of the airline’s operations.
Additionally, pilots benefit by being able to take training via e-learning modules on their iPads, rather than trying to coordinate in-classroom training sessions, which traditionally has been very challenging, considering their extraordinary travel schedules. Also, the app allows pilots to complete non-flying duties whenever and wherever they want, making productive use of their time spent waiting in airports. The overall effect for Air France is the evolution of its flight operations into an efficient and user-friendly process, which has proved so popular with the pilots that Air France has subsequently rolled out a similar iPad-based solution for its in-flight cabin crews.
Other airlines have followed suit, such as Alaska Airlines, which estimates that its iPad-based system saves the company over 2.4 million pieces of paper overall and 25 pounds of paper per flight (which is critical in some of the remote locations serviced by the airline).
RehabCare
The 18,000 employees of RehabCare provide rehab and post-acute care services, in over 1200 hospitals and facilities across 43 states. In such an environment every minute counts and employees need to track and record every detail, including the diagnosis, treatment, and when the appointment began and ended. To meet these challenges, RehabCare equipped its staff with easy-to-use, process-driven applications on iPhone and iPad mobile devices to provide point-of-care information capture quickly and easily. Additionally, their cloud-based applications allow access to detailed patient information anytime, anywhere. RehabCare estimates it is saving millions per year, while enabling its employees to quickly capture and/or consult critical data in an intuitive manner. Benefits also extend to the patients, as the app significantly reduces patient pre-admission screening times.
Cisco
Cisco itself has been recognized for leading digital innovation in the workplace of its 70,000 employees worldwide. As a large and global organization, Cisco noticed the trends in collaboration and the need for an integrated workforce experience, and as such implemented various solutions to this effect. For example, it launched a Cisco video communication and collaboration platform to communicate more effectively, as well as enterprise social software to facilitate healthy collaboration with personalization and relevance. These programs include a connected workspace, wiki, and video blogs, expertise locator, and sales productivity, remote collaboration, and telecommuting applications.
As shown in Figure 1-9, these platforms connect to each other for an integrated and user-friendly experience. With the implementation of seven distinct collaboration programs, Cisco recorded a total of $1.052B in net benefits from collaboration solutions.
Transforming Business Operations
While digital technologies can increase revenue by delivering new customer experiences and/or increasing employee productivity increases, profitability can also be increased by leveraging digitalization to streamline and economize business operations, as the following examples demonstrate.
Boeing
There are more than 6 million parts that make up a Boeing 747 aircraft, which all have to come together at precisely the right times in order to complete production. Furthermore, since these aircraft are assembled in the largest building in the world, namely Boeing’s Everett Factory as shown in Figure 1-10, there’s a lot of ground to cover when something goes missing. The bottom-line impact to Boeing of a misplaced or lost part, toolkit, machinery, or work-in-progress (WIP) inventory is greater than $1 million per incident. To reduce such losses, Boeing implemented RFID tracking along with Cisco wireless infrastructure location capabilities to instantly identify where any key part, tool, or WIP inventory is at any given time. This digital parts-tracking system reduced production delays, inventory expenses, and even government fines.
Codelco
Codelco, a Chilean state-owned mining company, is the world’s largest producer of copper. Mining not only is dark, dirty, and labor-intensive process, but is also very dangerous, as was amply demonstrated by the events that captured the world’s attention that unfolded in a (different company’s) Chilean mine in 2010, where 33 workers were trapped underground for 68 days.
To make mining operations safer, Codelco equipped its immense mining trucks, shown in Figure 1-11, with digital technologies that allow them to drive autonomously, arriving at their destinations just-in-time and with fewer accidents than those with human drivers. Codelco then expanded the application of similar technologies to other mining equipment, making these autonomous as well. Now, many of Codelco’s workers don’t head down to the mine to work, but rather to the control center in the city. Mining via autonomous equipment not only improves safety, but also brings additional economic benefits to Codelco. For example, removing humans from underground mines allows Codelco to design them to different specifications, allowing Codelco to dig with less cost and with lower risk, thus opening up the possibility of exploiting ore caches that may not have been economically feasible otherwise.
BC Hydro
BC Hydro is a Canadian electric utility in the province of British Columbia, and is the main electric distributor serving nearly 2 million customers. BC Hydro has installed 1.93 million smart meters since 2011 and more than 99 percent of customers now have a new meter.
Since the installation of these smart meters, BC Hydro has realized over $100 million in benefits, primarily from operational savings. Customers also benefit, as these meters have made their bills more accurate, due to reduced manual meter reads and bill estimates. Customers can also now view their hourly and daily energy use through their online account, providing them new tools to save energy and money. Furthermore, such new metering technology has laid the foundation for more widespread use of small-scale, green, distributed electricity generation including solar and wind power.
Driving Digital Transformation with the Internet of Things
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), digital transformation is taking place in virtually every area of our lives. With billions of smart devices coming online every year, massive revolutions are taking place in the following fields:
Environmental monitoring: IoT sensors are being used to monitor air and water quality, atmospheric and soil conditions, the movements of wildlife and their habitats, and even early warning-systems for earthquakes and tsunamis.
Infrastructure management: IoT devices are being used to monitor infrastructure resources like bridges, railway tracks, wind farms, and even waste management systems. These devices can be used to monitor activity, measure structural conditions, schedule repairs and maintenance, and coordinate emergency response.
Manufacturing: IoT intelligent systems are enabling the rapid manufacturing of new products, dynamic response to product demands, and real-time optimization of manufacturing production and supply chain networks. These systems can also optimize plant operations, energy operations, and health and safety.
Energy management: IoT devices are being integrated into all forms of energy-consuming devices (switches, power outlets, bulbs, televisions, etc.) and are able to communicate with the utility supply company in order to effectively balance power generation and energy usage. Such devices also offer the opportunity for consumers to remotely control their devices, or centrally manage them via a cloud-based interface, and enable advanced functions like scheduling (e.g., remotely powering on or off heating systems, controlling ovens, changing lighting conditions, etc.).
Medical and healthcare: IoT devices are being used to enable remote health-monitoring and emergency-notification systems. These health-monitoring devices range from blood pressure and heart rate monitors to advanced devices capable of monitoring specialized implants, such as pacemakers or advanced hearing aids. Additionally, consumer-oriented smart devices encouraging healthy living are proving very popular, such as connected scales, wearable heart monitors, step counters, etc.
Building and home automation: IoT devices are being leveraged to monitor and control the mechanical, electrical, and electronic systems used in various types of buildings.
Transportation: Smart devices are enabling inter- and intra-vehicular communication, smart traffic control, smart parking, electronic toll collection systems, logistics and fleet management, vehicle control, and safety and road assistance.
Smart cities: There are several planned or ongoing large-scale deployments of “smart cities”—that is, cities that have nearly every element monitored and controlled by network-enabled smart devices. For example, Songdo, South Korea, the first of its kind, is a fully equipped and wired smart city, and is nearing completion. Nearly everything in this city is connected and is streaming data for machine-driven analysis, all with little or no human intervention. Also, Barcelona is a Cisco flagship smart city which integrates digital technologies to urban services (like smart parking, smart lighting, location-based analytics, etc.) and solutions (such as energy management, safety and security, and cloud exchange).
Are You Ready?
New market opportunities and business models, fast-moving disruptive threats, and an exploding IoT landscape are all driving digital transformation. As such, the relevant questions are no longer “What is digital transformation?” and “Why should you care?” but rather “Are you ready?”
The network not only is at the center of all the users, applications, and devices that are driving digital transformation, but is also the platform that can most effectively enable it. This is why Cisco has developed its new Cisco Digital Network Architecture to meet these dynamic, complex, and rapidly evolving business needs, as discussed in subsequent chapters.
Summary
This chapter discussed the “why?” behind Cisco Digital Network Architecture, which has as its goal the driving of digital transformation. The benefits of digital transformation were examined (including 9 percent greater revenues versus industry peers and 26 percent greater profits, according to Harvard Business Review), as were the threats facing businesses that are slow to transform digitally (approximately 40 percent of the top ten incumbents in each industry being faced with digital disruption within five years).
Various businesses that have transformed entire industries digitally were reviewed, including Apple, PayPal, WhatsApp, Uber, and others. Also businesses that excelled in transforming customer experience were discussed, including Burberry, Starbucks, and UPS. So too were businesses that transformed their employee experiences, including Air France, RehabCare, and even Cisco itself. Additionally, companies that digitally overhauled their operations were presented, including Boeing, Codelco, and BC Hydro.
Finally, the massive revolutionary impact of the Internet of Things was also overviewed, to illustrate that digital transformation extends far beyond the workplace and indeed is affecting virtually every area of our lives.
Thus, having discussed the business reasons supporting digital transformation, let’s focus specifically on the business value of a Cisco digital network Architecture as the platform to enabling such transformation.
Further Reading
Bradley, J., J. Loucks, J. Macaulay, A. Noronha, and M. Wade. “Digital Vortex: How Digital Disruption Is Redefining Industries.” Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. June 2015. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/industry-solutions/digital-vortex-report.pdf.
Oracle Corporation. “2011 Customer Experience Impact Report: Getting to the Heart of the Consumer and Brand Relationship.” 2012. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf.
Parker, G., M. Van Alstyne, and S. Choudary. Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 2016.
Rogers, D. The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press; 2016.
Westerman, G., D. Bonnet, and A. McAffee. Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press; 2014.