CTech’s Book Review: Understanding customer and company digital ecosystems

Raz Heiferman is the Senior Digital Transformation Advisor of BDO Israel and Chairman of the Professional Committee at Israel Chamber of Information Technology. He has joined CTech to share a review of “The Future of Competitive Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital Ecosystems” by Mohan Subramaniam.

Title: “The Future of Competitive Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital Ecosystems”
Author: Mohan Subramaniam
Format: Book, Tablet
Where: Home

Raz Heiferman, Senior Digital Transformation Advisor of BDO Israel and Chairman of the Professional Committee at Israel Chamber of Information Technology

Summary:

The book provides a fresh perspective on the role of data and digital ecosystems in creating competitive advantage in the digital era. Those products transmit interactive and streaming data based on the usage of the products by the customers, what Mohan calls the consumption ecosystem. These new streams of data provide new insights into the way customers use the products, enable deep personalization, and understand what type of features are most popular and what type of features should be added to bring new value to the customer. Together with smart products, the book provides the basis to understand how companies can create digital ecosystems with complementary companies from other sectors, by using APIs to connect the companies. For example, a car manufacturer can build an ecosystem with coffee chains so the driver can order his favorite coffee and have it as soon as he arrives at the coffee shop, or have a parking slot pre-allocated, and much more.

Important themes:

The difference between episodic data and streaming data and the new capabilities of the smart product, the definition of production ecosystems (the set of systems that create data internally and can be controlled by the company) and consumption ecosystems (the set of systems the create and stream data based on the customer's use of the product). This is a new type of system and companies must learn how to collect streaming data and extract new insights. Digital ecosystems are becoming a new and important capability that companies can and must develop to provide new value to their customers.

What I’ve learned:

I learned how important it is to use and promote streaming data that smart products provide. This is a whole new game that companies must learn how to leverage. It also brings new challenges such as privacy, cyber threats, and more. The basis of the new category of smart products is trust between the digital customer and the company. Without trust, customers will not be willing to share usage data. This is something companies must think about strategically and adopt to the new environment.

Critiques:

The book doesn't emphasize the importance of the data as the basis of analytics for decision-making support and concentrates mainly on smart products and APIs to develop digital ecosystems. Data is an important foundation for decision making and the book is less focused on that.

Who should read this book:

Any manager that wants to understand how to leverage data and technology to create new competitive advantage and strategy to win in this turbulent and dynamic economic environment. As said "data is the new oil" and this book provides the basis to understand why data has become so crucial and how to leverage the new capabilities. It is a must for the modern manager to lead his company in the digital era.