The future still shocks!

Hussein Shobokshi IN today’s global economy, much of an enterprise’s growth will stem from “hyper-digitization”, where products and services are entirely or mostly digital.  In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2020, roughly one-quarter of the global domestic product will be generated as a result of digital activity. For more than a decade, we have been expecting the Internet to blow up universities. But last time anyone looked, colleges are still raising their tuition costs and getting record numbers of applications.  Online courses have so far been about as disruptive to college as turkey has been to Thanksgiving. For many companies, going digital is the fastest path to growth because it rapidly diversifies product and service offerings, improves customer satisfaction and creates greater efficiencies. But to successfully compete in a hyper-digitized market, CEOs must not selectively pick and choose digital technology as a tactical tool. Rather, they must position their companies to strategically leverage it as part of a corporate-wide digital transformation. Now a company called Udacity, partnering with Google, shows us that we have been focused on the wrong disruption. The big change won’t be the digitization of college; it will be the unbundling of the college degree into discrete, focused chunks, which Udacity calls nano-degrees. In other words, technology will assault the college degree, not the experience of college, and that will make all the difference. In fact, if you play this development forward a decade, it likely means that an expensive Bachelor’s Degree or Bachelor of Science degree won’t be necessary for a good career. A lot of people will do really well by skipping college and assembling a collection of nano-degrees throughout their lives. Technology tends to unbundle stuff. Look how it’s unbundling television, or how it unbundled the music album. The college degree is a bundle that doesn’t work for everybody and creates unnatural market conditions, which is why college costs consistently rise faster than inflation. The next generation will be able to pull apart the college bundle the way people today are pulling the plug on cable. CEO and CIO alignment is crucial to drive such innovation and create the enterprises of the future, an enterprise that will be better positioned to react in real time, adapt quickly to change and deliver unprecedented growth, innovation and value in ways that were once considered impossible.