Edge Computing as a Cloud Digital Transformation

Introduction

This blog is inspired by my teacher from Berkeley HaaS Business School, Dr. Sara Beckman

"We realize that in order to make something, it has to be designed first, in order to be made"

It appears as a truism, but one of those truisms leading to revelations

This was discovered years ago by Dr. Sara Beckman, from U.C, Berkeley Haas Business School and the the founder of the executive product management course, a landmark 12 years ago

It was back on the days  when the Research and Development people would work on a product until THEY thought they finished with it. This method of  thinking is still in use today. Technologists are unaware of who their customers are and, who don't care where they are located. The technical concept is so enrapturing that people all over the planet will say Wow and Aha and buy whatever we decided they need.

Design Thinking 

From IDEO Stanford U.

"In 1993 an MBA student joined the operation  MBA course (inventory management, quality management) at Berkeley.
 She was a fashion designer in New York returning to the business school
At the end of the course she came to me asked: “Shouldn’t design be a part of the MBA curriculum?” I said “Yes, why not?” so we started a course called “Design as a strategic Business Issue"
This is nothing new. We have industrial design, architecture, urban design,
At HaaS School of business we talk about “Problem Framing” and “Problem Solving” These are two activities we treat separately.
If you look back in history and look at quality management (Demming, Crosby and more) they describe on being very focused on the customer in order to define the outcomes you want to achieve.
They talk about asking why” five times in order to get to the root causes or underlying patterns. They generate different ways of solving a problem and then experimenting for the best solution."

This is kind of the same thing, as Design Think

People versus technology

The number 1 reason of failed products, based on research the last 50 years is overwhelmingly the lack of understanding of customer and user needs

Most organizations today make their decisions on basis of numbers that sometimes have NOTHING to do with whether they’re satisfying their customers. For example,  we  may want to run our software service over 800 wi-fi platforms, without asking why the humans want to do this.

Digital Transformation

According to Forrester  2018,  "Digital Innovators Rewrite The Rules Of Business"

Rule No. 1: Deliver Easy, Effective, And Emotional Customer Experiences
Rule No. 2: Focus Operations On Things Customers Value
Rule No. 3: Build Platforms And Partnerships To Accelerate And Scale
Rule No. 4: Innovate At The Intersection Of Experiences And Operations

This a slogan parroting what the people at Berkeley said a decade ago.

 Forrester says redefine "Your Business With Technology . . . Or fade To Black

Some understand this as digitizing your business, a tedious task and this will allow you create new technologies in order to not fall to black, I suppose.

Remember the People

If you think digital transformation as just a matter of new technologies for new efficiencies and revenue to pour in, you’re not seeing the full picture of digital transformation. A major part of any business process is the people who are in it,

In fact, the technical part of the transformation can be the easy part.

“While the cloud and other new technologies certainly offer IT organizations tremendous opportunities to automate and optimize their systems, those CIOs who become too invested in the technology nuts and bolts are not the IT leaders who are driving digital transformation,” agrees Mekhala Roy in TechTarget. “What they need to do is find people who can automate their IT environments in such a way that allows for efficient and safe application deployment.”

Instead, people are, in fact, analog, writes Philip Watt in the Customer Think blog, and treating them as if they’re digital typically doesn’t work very well. “The very nature of analog electronics meant that 70 percent could often be 0.69 volts or 0.71 volts or even varying between these, but ‘good enough’ to represent the value,” he writes.  Similarly, people approximate things and have feelings, and that has to be accounted for. “In the rush to transform everything customer service-related to digital, remember that customers, humans, are analog creatures,” he writes. “They have daily variations in their feelings and behaviors, they often have a low ‘signal to noise’ ratio (distractions, distortions in what is heard, deletion of large amounts of information received).”

Who’s In Charge?

One solution? Have the digital leaders report directly to the CEO. “In organizations where the CIO, CTO or any other digital leader has a direct reporting line to the CEO, IT/digital is perceived as more effective than in organizations where they do not,”

Organizing paper documents and streamlining business processes offers great promise in saving companies money and making them more efficient. But if companies want to tap the full potential that technology holds, they’ll need to keep their eye on the role of people in digital transformation. These people have different talents and are harder to recruit than technologists

Edge Computing

I wonder whether edge computing is not a digital transformation of a cloud, using the Design Thinking developed by U of Berkeley a decade ago. It is the way to make Cloud Operators survive

Gartner says : "The Edge Will Eat the Cloud" This is the same as saying: :" the Cloud will create the edge in order to survive"

The Cloud assimilates the edge