4 Principles Of Digital Transformation
When Steve Jobs and Apple launched the Macintosh with great fanfare in 1984, it was to be only one step in a long journey that began with Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos and the development of the Alto at Xerox PARC more than a decade before. The Macintosh was, in many ways, the culmination of everything that came before.
Yet it was far from the end of the road. In fact, it wouldn’t be until the late 90s, after the rise of the Internet, that computers began to have a measurable effect on economic productivity. Until then, personal computers were mainly an expensive device to automate secretarial work and for kids to play video games.
The truth is that innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. Yet what few realize is that it is the last part, transformation, that is often the hardest and the longest. In fact, it usually takes about 30 years to go from an initial discovery to a major impact on the world. Here’s what you can do to move things along.
1. Identify A Keystone Change
About a decade before the Macintosh, Xerox invented the Alto, which had many of the features that the Macintosh later became famous for, such as a graphical user interface, a mouse and a bitmapped screen. Yet while the Macintosh became legendary, the…
