Problem: The key problem is that our business environment is changing—changing at an ever-faster pace. Now the only thing constant is change; with a higher frequency since the Internet as disruptive innovation became a fundamental of the business world. Yet human behavioral changes always happen more slowly than the technological changes that spawn them.

In order to see ahead, it's useful to look back 20 years across five stages of the first generation of revolutionary business practices:

1. E-commerce along the information superhighway
2. E-business in the dot-com era
3. Collaborative commerce by virtual enterprises at the turn of the twenty-first century
4. Social business evolution of Web 2.0 over the past decade
5. Business ecosystems as a twenty-first-century business model of a digital business

A digital business consists of a set of digital stakeholder relationships. They empower employees and engage trading partners to form a virtual enterprise. The digital businesses operate separately along with social business practices and processes. Today, a customer-focused digital business model leverages stakeholder relationships using digital collaboration channels in their virtual enterprise to deliver a great customer experience that will produce a market leader. Yet the only way to sustain their competitive advantage is for digital businesses to sense changes in their business ecosystem, and then adapt their plans based on predictions of how these insights will produce customer delight and advocacy. A discussion of these agile business practices in Chapter 1 provides a context for this new way of doing business—digitally.

Even as these stages have progressed rapidly over the past 20 years, the enabling technologies have changed more quickly. Information technology (IT) evolution is now measured in terms of “Internet time” as fourth-generation hardware, software, and network system technologies are deployed. Ubiquitous access to information at any time, in any place, and in any way is expected as a routine practice that provides a state of presence that drives personal experience delivery as the new normal of customer service.

The basis of business competition evolved from product-centered financial assets to customer-centered information assets. This business model paradigm shift has moved away from “past is prelude” thinking characterized by business-as-usual planning. With this traditional practice, extrapolation of strategy plans is based on assumptions that the future will continue like the past, with historical time-series sales forecasting and static regression analysis models. Now best practices lead to outside-the-box thinking. This is reflected by scenario-based planning that anticipates change via adaptive sense-and-respond business intelligence processes, real-time customer-facing decision support, and dynamic simulation analytic models.

Business agility produces a sustainable competitive advantage and is the goal for next-generation digital businesses. We define business agility as innovation via collaboration to be able to anticipate challenges and opportunities before they occur. This definition is made actionable as a business practice by incorporating a holistic performance management system using a balanced scorecard for the business ecosystem as a whole. This is enhancing the balance sheet with the balanced scorecard. In Chapter 1 we elaborate on this approach in terms of how the concept of a business ecosystem provides a model for sustainable competitive advantage. This ecosystem approach works by leveraging collaborative commerce synergy with “coopetition.”

Such actionable use cases and scenarios, when combined with proven conceptual frameworks and including insightful research, create a forum to understand the ways of putting these ideas into practice. This research draws from both our own primary sources as well as secondary sources via key thought leaders. From our IT outpost here in Silicon Valley, we'll bring you what's happening with the “next big thing”—utilizing the convergence of a decade's worth of technological advancement in low-cost, efficient computing power to extract actionable information from large data sets.

Challenges and Opportunities: The challenges and opportunities resulting from these evolving digital business models have generated a “perfect storm” for creating business agility. The convergence of cloud, social, mobile, and big data is synergistic—where the power of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The transformative nature of a digital environment has not only caused the nature of business competition to change, but it has also changed the fundamental business value-creation processes and measures of performance. We explore this convergence in more detail in Chapter 2 and add video as a fifth force of the perfect storm that is powerfully transforming the way businesses relate to and engage their customers via technology.

Throughout this book we take a use-case approach via a technology–industry–applications framework reflected in this three-dimensioned collection of practical examples.

1. Technology—how the Force 5 Tornado spawned by a perfect storm creates a rainbow that leads to a pot of gold.

The convergence of cloud, social, mobile, video, and big data provides synergy for determining what the vision, mission, and strategy of the next generation of digital businesses is using in collaboration internally to align functional resources and externally to leverage trading partner capabilities with compatible core competencies. In this manner we can use the digital business value chain to develop a market-leading ecosystem where the power of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

2. Industry—travel and sports scenario planning examples.

People are familiar with the global travel industry and international sports events from their personal experience, so these examples provide an entertaining way to tell compelling stories about creating business agility. Travel generated over one billion tourist experiences last year, according to Elizabeth Becker, author of Overbooked (Simon & Schuster, 2013). It is the number one economic development engine of the biggest business sector in the world economy. The nature of sports as a universal human activity provides the team metaphor for collaboration enabling agility for competitive advantage.

The story of how the Kauai Marriott Resort and Beach Club formed a business ecosystem to enable the success of its new hospitality venture provides an insider's look at building a virtual enterprise. Such insights demonstrate how digital business teams may leverage their understanding of these converging technologies to share their intellectual capital in order to fulfill the expectations of their trading partner community.

With the “Selling Sonoma County Wine Country” use case scenario, we feature an integrated case study of Sonoma County Tourism's Sneakaway marketing campaign to illustrate key concepts of business agility readiness described in each chapter. These insights focus on how CXO teams (the chiefs of business functions and units) may leverage their understanding of these converging technologies to create business agility in terms of innovation via a collaborative culture that mitigates risk by celebrating failures as lessons learned in order to drive future success.

Use cases from the world of sports are led by the latest competition for the oldest trophy in international sports. The story of how ORACLE TEAM USA harnessed the perfect storm of this Force 5 Tornado to propel the greatest comeback in sports history illustrates the business value of IT in creating the agility to produce a sustainable competitive advantage.

3. Applications—CIO and CMO business value using big data.

Featured along the applications dimension is the marketing function in general, with a specific focus of the framework on the relationship between the chief marketing officer (CMO) and the chief information officer (CIO) in delivering the business value of IT. The best practices for both the CIO and the CMO in terms of digital business management are viewed through the lens of business agility readiness.

Use cases presented are in conjunction with the “CMO-CIO Partnership for Collaborative Marketing Agility” scenario. This business value theme is developed using a strategy of innovation for CMO-CIO alignment around big data analytics based on collaborative marketing best practices. A Business Agility Readiness Roadmap is presented using a balanced scorecard to describe and measure the alignment gap. Such a tool may be used to assess how to best vet the internal/external collaboration activities associated with management of big data for driving predictive analytics. This is a critical success factor in managing the digital business for competitive advantage of the business ecosystem as a whole.

Solution: The solution to build a next-gen digital business is business ecosystem integration. Our approach was created by utilizing the two fundamental elements of virtual enterprise information systems engineering:

1. Ecosystem Hub architecture that employs the Force 5 Tornado technologies using collaborative commerce concepts
2. Ecosystem implementation roadmap that is a model for digital business evolution using business agility readiness gap analysis concepts

The collaborative commerce architecture is described throughout the book with use case scenarios from the ubiquitous global multitrillion-dollar travel industry to provide clear examples to demonstrate the “what-why-how” story. Such familiar scenarios use a virtual enterprise integration methodology that is illustrated by a virtual Visitor Information Center platform as an ecosystem hub that is developed using an iterative incremental implementation roadmap.

Lessons Learned: What are the lessons learned from this accelerating pace of information technology disruption that has created a climate of innovation further multiplied by the convergence of those same technologies? The global consumerization of IT and the resulting “bring your own device” (BYOD) phenomenon in the business world are driving the winds of change—generating the perfect storm of technology convergence with cloud, social, mobile, video, and big data acting like a Force 5 Tornado disrupting the business playing field.

In the context of the disruptive technology metaphor, enterprises that are forward-looking can harness this disruptive power to their advantage via big data with predictive analytics in order to:

• Produce early warnings to strengthen infrastructure via the cloud.
• Collaborate for real-time problem solving in their communities via social networks.
• Communicate vital decision-making information to the right people, places, and times via mobility solutions.
• Provide interactive messages for alerts and instructional information via videos.

By developing readiness for creating business agility and harnessing the five technological forces that have converged in our present business environment, market leaders will transform the Force 5 Tornado spawned by this perfect storm into a coherent pattern of light, creating a rainbow that leads to a pot of gold—achieving success.

Innovators will change the way they do business as they develop customer-centric business models to compete as a collaborative ecosystem. Such digital businesses will use this technological tornado to reengineer their decision-making processes with embedded predictive big data analytics to create valuable customer insights that deliver compelling customer experiences. This strategy will enable a new generation of market share leaders to produce a sustainable competitive advantage.

In the spirit of putting the data back into data processing, we have created a business agility data model that describes how this convergence enables building next-generation digital businesses. In doing so we have extended the conventional cloud, social, mobile technology conversation to reflect predictive big data analytics and include video as shared content for internal/external collaboration with customer co-creation. This data model provides the context for the content in the following chapters in order to describe an actionable Business Agility Readiness Roadmap in terms of people, processes, and technology that is integrated by data.

Next Steps: Taking the next steps on the journey to create business agility requires the understanding of how sense-and-respond information management strategies facilitate executing adaptive business strategies, as well as the courage to lead the change management initiatives necessary to transform internal processes and external relationships. Fundamental to this transformation is to reengineer the decision-making processes in order to make better resource allocation decisions. This requires the capability to sense business ecosystem signals that are key performance indicators, and respond with customer insights using predictive analytics. This creates business agility and when paired with a culture of customer experience management produces a sustainable competitive advantage.

The purpose of this book is to facilitate the translation of technical issues to business people and business issues to technical people so that they can collaborate to improve the competitive advantage of their business ecosystems, as well as contribute to the quality of life in our global marketplace. The target audience is the CXO team and their direct reports and staff in general, with special focus on establishing and strengthening the CMO-CIO partnership as an example of game-changing collaboration.

The strategic themes of the book focus on how the convergence of cloud, social, mobile, and video technologies with predictive big data analytics can produce sustainable business value. Chapters are organized to curate a compelling story about how this perfect storm of technology is creating business agility for market leaders. They are developing a competitive advantage via enabling the next generation of digital businesses to build sustainable ecosystems around the cultivation and harvesting of big data as a “whole product” solution. These themes explain how this convergence works in terms of the classic input-process-output model of a data processing system expressed as data-driven discovery processes feeding predictive analytics engines to produce insightful fact-based decisions while being mindful of garbage in, garbage out traps.

In writing this book, we take a business ecosystem point of view for developing digital business architecture. And we frame the twenty-first-century business value of IT in terms of business agility while relying on other sources as references for the construction details in the hands-on processes of doing the building itself. Many books have already been written about the cloud, business analytics, and social, mobile, and video technologies as separate topics in great detail. This book is written to satisfy the market need to integrate key concepts for digital business as a 360-degree transformation in terms of customer-centric strategy, customer-focused processes, and customer-facing apps.

This architectural view of a business ecosystem is reflected by the following list of the book's contents, which provides a preview of the technology convergence impact as highlights of a roadmap for business agility readiness:

1. Chapter 1 Bridging the Digital Divide
2. Chapter 2 Disruptive and Evolving Business Model
3. Chapter 3 Hyperconnectivity Drives Innovation
4. Chapter 4 Breaking the Barrier of Physical Infrastructure
5. Chapter 5 Power of Collaborative Management
6. Chapter 6 Mobility Drives Agility
7. Chapter 7 Listening to the Voices
8. Chapter 8 Role of Collective Intelligence
9. Chapter 9 Cultivating Knowledge Ecosystems
10. Chapter 10 2020 Foresight
11. Epilogue Selling Sonoma County Wine Country

Each chapter is structured to first feature a deep discussion of the key concepts and is illustrated by use cases to provide a broad view of their general applicability. The collection of use cases in each chapter features examples of best practices from industries such as travel, health care, education, and financial services, as well as expert insights in context with the technology–industry–applications framework.

At the end of the book, the Epilogue describes a use scenario about Selling Sonoma County Wine Country. It features an illustrative example of how a digital business can employ these concepts to create business agility. This travel destination and event industry scenario of a collaborative marketing campaign provides the context for an Ecosystem Hub implementation story that shows how to make it all work at the virtual enterprise level within the business ecosystem. This Business Agility Readiness roadmap is expressed in terms of people, processes, and technology that are integrated by data. The roadmap is keyed to the respective business, applications, and technology levels of the Ecosystem Hub architecture.

We intend to evolve this book with a clear, concise, and compelling story of “ecosystemism” as the driver of business agility for a game-changing strategy. We hope that your reading experience provides the understanding to be able to ask the right questions, as well as to provide some important answers.